[ebassi]

If your theme engine is as simple as Raleigh, then the chances of crashing applications because of a bug in the theme are smaller. Sadly, most (if not all) theme engines were far, far more complex than Raleigh.

We have bug reports coming especially from people using the Oxygen theme, which had a tendency to (against all recommendations) poke at the widget structure behind the style contexts because what could possibly go wrong.

Given the ability to inject random C code into applications that do not expect that, people will abuse it; hence the switch to a pure declarative language like CSS to describe the aspect of widgets. Your app may look like crap, but it won't crash because of that.

[cm3]

I agree, though none of the theme engines I've used regularly crashed. There were two KDE theme engines which managed to crash in their gtk variant, but those had more issues than that. No crashes whatsoever with all of gtk2-engines and also murrine or aurora.