Disclaimer: I have no desire to re-ignite KHTML vs WebKit arguments. Rather, the purpose of this blog post is to hopefully enlighten a technical question.

Over the last few months I've heard many KDE developers in various forums bemoan the lack of a working and stable WebKit KPart. The motivation behind this complaint seems to be that KDE folk want a WebKit browser option for KDE. Thus the naive solution is to just get the WebKit KDE KPart in shape. Given this motivation... the solution is wrong IMO.

In my last blog I found out that Qt is being evil when using QPainter::eraseRect() with a QImage based textured brush. How evil? Well, calling QPainter::fillRect() with the same brush results in something like a 30-50% speedup while achieving the exact same results. Not only that, but the QPainter::eraseRect() codepath makes QImage not thread safe for painting outside the main thread because it is silently using QPixmap behind the scenes.

Funny little story... I was profiling with valgrind recently and was shocked to discover a huge hiccup in the painting performance of my QImage raster based app. There was this repeated call to QPainter::drawTiledPixmap() that was soaking up CPU cycles. It was a true mystery as I had thought the canvas of my app was completely QImage based. Not so.

My previous post touched on the horrid FPS you can expect from any graphics intensive Qt app on the N810 at the moment. Ariya has pointed out one reason for the bad numbers: Qt decides to convert all 16 bit pixmaps to 32 bit before blitting even if the source QPaintDevice and the destination QPaintDevice are both 16 bit.

With all the recent interest in Nokia's N810 device among KDE and Qt developers I think it is important to note that Qt/X11 painting performance is badly broken when running under Hildon.

blah blah blah who took away the delete function for kdedevelopers.org blog entries blah blah blah

The United States just took a gigantic step away from the cliff today. An unknown federal district court judge just told the President of the United States where he could shove his warrantless wiretapping program.

Federal District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor is my new personal hero. She has ordered President Bush to immediately end his warrantless wiretapping program as it is in violation of the very Constitution of which his office is a creature. Here is how she puts it in her injunction:

IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that Defendants, its agents, employees, representatives, and
any other persons or entities in active concert or participation with Defendants, are permanently
enjoined from directly or indirectly utilizing the Terrorist Surveillance Program (hereinafter
“TSP

In the recent KDevelop dot interview I noticed a very astute comment by someone named borker:

With the release of Trolltech's java bindings it kinda feels like Christmas. I wanted to point out some more presents under the tree...

Seele, I understand that you are a big Pittsburgh fan and are understandably happy they "won", but I can't imagine how you can call it a "great game to watch." See, unlike most of the country and unlike most of the people at the stadium in Detroit and unlike all of the referees on the field, I was hoping for a Seahawks win. That game was horrible. But, don't take my word for it... read just about every account of the game, anywhere.