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Pinta v3.x (early) is slower than v1.7 #2230
Description
Description
I know this is not a fair comparison ... but I do appreciate that v1.7 opens at least x2 as fast as v3 opens on a Windows 10 PC (1909) - and more or less it does that I usually want from Pinta to do from me (bigger than Paint, smaller than Gimp which I don't know how to use)
To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the issue.
Additional Info
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Version
Please include your operating system (e.g. Ubuntu 22.04) and which version of Pinta (e.g. 2.1) you are using.
Activity
cameronwhite commentedon Aug 3, 2026
There's not too much we can do here since some of it's likely from newer GTK versions. But looking into a native AOT build would be worthwhile
stdedos commentedon Aug 3, 2026
"native AOT build"?
Also - if you want me to test something, it will have to take a while 😅
And of course I get that. I just wanted to note that - if it was interesting 🙏
Samueru-sama commentedon Aug 3, 2026
I recently made this repo after wondering for a long while why GTK4 apps were slow to launch on my system: https://github.com/Samueru-sama/GTK4-slow-launch-speed-test
Not sure if applicable to windows.
TLDR: The delay is mainly due to GTK4 doing a recursive icon lookup on startup, this is likely to be much worse on systems with a hard drive instead of ssd.
badcel commentedon Aug 3, 2026
@Samueru-sama did you bring this up on the GTK matrix chat or discourse?
In regard to native AOT I plan to officially support native AOT with GirCore (gircore/gir.core#975). I will see if I can put it in the milestones.
Samueru-sama commentedon Aug 3, 2026
Nope, I don't bother reporting bugs to gnome since I end up wasting my time.
Qronikarz commentedon Aug 3, 2026
Interesting, so if I'm reading it right, Pinta v3 can't be optimized to the point that it was in v2 (#1574) due to the gtk behaving differently. That's a shame.
badcel commentedon Aug 3, 2026
I won't be too quick with conclusions. There are no hard numbers here. Relative numbers don't say much.
It would probably be interesting how fast it starts up on the same machine with Linux or how fast it starts up in absolute numbers at all
If you start legacy apps on modern hardware they are almost always faster. But they don't support a lot of modern features either.
On the other hand for example I don't experience a general startup performance problem of GTK.
If the author thinks this should be worked on there probably needs to happen a lot of investigations as there could be different places involved inside and outside of Pintas responsibility.