[ebtalley]

I have liked Calibre when I have used it a few times, but the GUI is pretty slow compared to most software these days. I attributed it to using python, but maybe thats not the case? has anyone else found some speed hacks that make it easier to use? (or maybe its time for me to upgrade the machine it resides on?)

[Blahah]

There are plenty of blazing fast GUIs written in python; that's not the problem.

[slashclee]

Such as... ?

[xioxox]

My Veusz plotting package is pretty responsive and is written with PyQt. A few of the inner loops were recoded into C++, but the majority of the code is python.

[signed0]

Sublime Text 2 & 3.

[krelian]

Sublime Text 2 is written in C++

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822114

[Blahah]

Dropbox, Anki, FreeCAD

[jablan]

Kupfer and Gajim

[aoloe]

mypaint?

[msh]

Dropbox

[StevePerkins]

The slow startup time and general sluggishness was due to inefficiency with the database backend, rather than the GUI code itself.

The biggest new feature in 1.0 is a re-write of the 0.x data access layer. The application now starts almost instantly, and is much more responsive in general.

[berkut]

I'm pretty certain it's the Python side of things making it slow - I've been involved in a project which converted its PyQt interface to a native C++ Qt one, and the UI speed up in terms of responsiveness was significant.

[the_mitsuhiko]

Dropbox is written in Python too and the UI is far from sluggish.

[berkut]

It depends what the interface is doing - if it hasn't got deeply-nested layouts and widgets (like dropbox - it's just menus and simple dialogs), you can get away with it.

If you've got resizable windows with split nested views containing things like column lists or trees, you notice the overhead a lot more.