I have been experiencing slow performance when using Fl_Text_Editor in my application. I see a significant delay (some 7 seconds) when calling Fl_Text_Editor::buffer on a new Fl_Text_Buffer when my application starts. Is this normal behavior? I'm just so used to FLTK working almost instantly for every operation that this was surprising to me. I'm using FLTK 1.3.4 because I cannot right now move to a newer version of FLTK, because of system dependencies. Here's a snippet of the code I use, together with some debugging output so I could tell why it was being slow:

int w = 800;  // width of window
int h = 25;   // height of one widget
int m = 10;    // blank margin
int sw = 80;   // standard width

Fl_Double_Window *main_window = new Fl_Double_Window(w, 615, hw::progname().c_str());
ypos += h + 5;

Fl_Text_Editor *caption_text = new Fl_Text_Editor(xpos, ypos, w - xpos - m, 5*h, "Caption Text: ");
std::cout << "Checkpoint 5.2.1: " << timer.elapsed() << "\n";
caption_text->align(FL_ALIGN_LEFT);
std::cout << "Checkpoint 5.2.2: " << timer.elapsed() << "\n";
caption_text->callback((Fl_Callback*) cb_caption_text, &show);
std::cout << "Checkpoint 5.2.3: " << timer.elapsed() << "\n";
caption_text->when(FL_WHEN_CHANGED);
std::cout << "Checkpoint 5.2.4: " << timer.elapsed() << "\n";
Fl_Text_Buffer *caption_buf = new Fl_Text_Buffer;
std::cout << "Checkpoint 5.2.5: " << timer.elapsed() << "\n";
caption_text->buffer(caption_buf);
std::cout << "Checkpoint 5.2.6: " << timer.elapsed() << "\n";
caption_text->wrap_mode(Fl_Text_Editor::WRAP_AT_BOUNDS, 5);
std::cout << "Checkpoint 5.2.7: " << timer.elapsed() << "\n";

Here's some of the output:

Checkpoint 1: 0.0038885
Checkpoint 2: 0.00390178
Checkpoint 3: 0.00391342
Checkpoint 4: 0.00393642
Checkpoint 5: 0.00394311
Checkpoint 5.1: 0.00394802
Checkpoint 5.2: 0.00395305
Checkpoint 5.2.1: 0.00396602
Checkpoint 5.2.2: 0.00397152
Checkpoint 5.2.3: 0.0039758
Checkpoint 5.2.4: 0.00398055
Checkpoint 5.2.5: 0.00399762
Checkpoint 5.2.6: 6.98275
Checkpoint 5.2.7: 6.98277
Checkpoint 5.3: 6.98278
Checkpoint 6: 6.98278
Checkpoint 7: 6.9828

As you can see, the delay comes from the line where the editor is given the text buffer to use. Everything else is fast, as expected.

Any light that could be shed on this would be appreciated.

Eric