Why is Qtopia much faster?

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:38:35 +1000 Lorn Potter <lpotter at trolltech.com> babbled:

> > Well, a almost desktop compliant x11 system with a wide variety of  
> > frameworks, libs and programming languages.
> 
> It will be hard to achieve a consistent look and feel across all these
> toolkits. Not to mention inter process communication.

dbus. common look and feel - as long as there is choice and variety, this won't
happen. wouldn't we love it if everyone drove a blue ford falcon.it's be so
uniform. parts would be easy to find ad everyone drove the same car. spray
painters would have such an easy time - they only need to stock blue paint! :)

in the end - we are humans. variety *IS* part of life. without it our lives
would be dull and boring. different toolkits, different looks, different feels,
different applications, languages, hell... different devices... are here to
stay :)

i guess i just don't lik the idea of a thin vertical stack where at each layer
1 choice has been made for me and i'm stuck with it, like it or not, or i move
to a whole different stack. eg - must use qt, or must use gtk, or must use efl.
allow the choice to be made at the latest stage - not the earliest. i prefer
the idea of an ecosystem where all these toolkits and mechanisms get along and
co-habitate. jungle vs ivory tower guess... i'm a jungle kinda guy! :) anyone
want a banana? :)

> > You can not port your garden variety x11 app to qtopia. Which you can  
> > (almost) do with the other frameworks.
> 
> Any Qt app can be 'ported' easily. Just as with gtk, or efl, or
> pick-your-toolkit for any library that is on the device.
> So yes, you _can_ port your garden variety app to Qtopia. It just needs to be
> written with one common toolkit - Qt.

sure, but any non-qt app.. will be a behemoth to port. you either:

1. do a whole port of the app to qt/qtopia (work work work!)
  (not to mention now that this basically means you pay nokia a license fee,
or your app must be GPL, can't be mit-x11, bsd, APL, MPL etc.).
2. you port the toolkit (port gtk, efl, etc. etc.) to qtopia (and this also
then follows the above license issue), which when done once at least covers all
users of that toolkit, but which is no small feat
3. you write an xserver for qtopia/qws! (the server itself will be GPL or you
have to pay nokia), but you avoid license issues... and now anything that uses
x11 should work...

but the above all require work... a signficant amount of it.

-- 
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org>