Fastest GUI toolkit?

[David Ascher]

On Mon, 8 Nov 1999, Gordon Williams wrote:

> I have an application where I need to draw many lines fast and repeatedly
> (an oscilloscope).  The number of lines ranges from about 1000 to 16000. 
> Currently I have the application using Tkinter but I am finding it too
> slow.  I am currently using W95 as an os, but would prefer to make the code
> portable across other os if possible.  Right now speed is more important
> than portability so I would be willing to give this up.
> 
> I would like to draw 1000 lines in 1/10 of a second on a P166 machine.  (Am
> I way off the mark??)  I was hoping that someone would have tried different
> packages and could give me pointers in the right direction.

I'd use OpenGL w/ NumPy arrays.  Especially if you don't need antialiasing
(I'm guessing that these are horizontal or vertical lines), you could do
several hundred lines per frame (1/60th or so), possibly many more if you
have hardware acceleration.

MGL is another possibility, but it's far less portable, and the Python
bindings aren't nearly as stable (or released =).

--david

See: http://starship.python.net:9673/crew/da/Code/PyOpenGL