Comment Re:directfb-lite and other webkit ports (Score 1) 240
Which version of Qt did you use? There were a few releases that focused on load-time speedups.
Have you tried it against Qt5? It should be 99% identical
it was qt4.3 or thereabouts. the problem is that qt does far too much. when you think that lite 1.2 is around an 86k binary and qt4 and qt5 are several tens of *megabytes* you start to understand the extent of the problem. libQtCore is 3mbytes. libQtGui is 11mbytes.
now bear in mind that when you're doing something like a web browser, all you really need is a font and pixel drawing system (cairo, pango), an input box (liblite), a way to read the keyboard and mouse, and err... it really ain't that complicated, then you start to understand why GTK and QT are complete overkill. only when you need to do things like open a new popup window or open a new browser window that you need something more complex, and heck, those can be done with a bit of X11 or Win32/GDI message handling for goodness sake. in cases where you're doing direct framebuffer writes (such as in chrome os, android, b2g, DirectFB applications and more) then you don't even need _that_, in many cases.
so in effect it doesn't matter how good Qt4, Qt5 or GTK2 or GTK3 are, the fact remains that even the initialisation of the sub-systems that aren't going to be used are all simply too much. the only reason for maintaining those ports (of webkit) is to make it easy for people who wish to integrate webkit into *their* applications that are written in those frameworks.
so the difference is: under the circumstances where you don't need the infrastructure of those frameworks, because you're doing a stand-alone web browser, these heavy-weight frameworks like Qt and Gtk are an exceptionally bad idea.