A theme manager is required to balance coding style and efficiency about tgui HOT 7 CLOSED

I agree that the following code would be more graceful that with the copy, but I don't really see a reason for a separate theme manager to be created.
auto button1 = Button::create(filename, section);
auto button2 = Button::create(filename, section);

The extra step to create the theme manager looks unneeded to me, unless you have another reason for it other than performance. If performance is the only reason then I can just as well cache the theme file internally.

But I am planning to review the widget creating code again, so I will keep this idea in mind.
A theme manager could perhaps be useful to make all widgets depend on one theme so that the theme of all widgets can be changed with just one line of code.

But this is all going to be for next year.

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Yeah, using a theme cache provides better performance without any interface changes, it is a great idea for doing such optimizations in minor versions.

from tgui.

I will do some tests tomorrow to see if the perfomance difference is really that big.
I am not planning to add a cache if the difference is hardly noticable.

from tgui.

How big the performance improves depends on how big theme files are and how often to create the widgets dynamically, so I think it is a MUST-DO feature for some special scene(like create large amount of widgets in a window without using copy)

from tgui.

I just did some speed tests, and the caching won't be needed to make recreating the widget faster compared to copying it.

The tests have been done with 16.000 widgets (10.000 widgets of each of the 16 used types).
The speed difference with the white-theme is expected since it doesn't load or parse any files.

• Creating widgets with built-in white theme: 6.25 seconds
• Creating widgets with black theme: 31 seconds
• Copying widgets: 36.5 second

So it looks like copying is even slower than recreating the widget. I will look for a reason later.

from tgui.

Ok, these numbers don't really represent much. Some widgets must be taking a lot more time than they should.

New test with 100.000 buttons:
Creating with White theme: 3.6 seconds
Creating with Black theme: 8 seconds
Copying: 2.7 seconds

from tgui.

Ok, caching seems to have a significant impact (much more than I expected).
I will be adding the caching in both v0.6.6 and v0.7-dev.

Again, for 100.000 buttons:
Copying buttons: 1.25s
Cached theme file: 3.5s
Section at beginning of file: 5.45s
Section at end of file: 14.3s

So I notice a few things:

• Copying is still more than twice as fast as reloading the button (nothing can be done about that)
• It takes only 0,02 to 0,05 milliseconds to create a button if one was already loaded before
• The 5.45s is equivalent with the 8s earlier. I am using a different version, but that means that the new callback system in v0.7-dev will make creating widgets slightly slower.

I am going to close this issue (once it is implemented) since I don't expect to be writing a ThemeManager soon and I already have another issue reminding me that the entire loading code should be reviewed.
Thanks for making the suggestion though, I never knew that parsing these theme files took so long.

PS: All times were measured in debug mode. When using TGUI it should be much faster.

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