As much as I love st, I had to stop using it recently. When using a bitmap font in tmux, large amounts of text sent to stdout bring my computer to a standstill. X is using 100% of a single core. I've switched to gnome-terminal and the issue is gone.
Really? Generally accepted by who? My unscientific personal tests show that Gnome Terminal is the fastest and lightest VTE.
yes | head -n 1000000 > two_megs.txt
time cat two_megs.txt
OTOH I can google up posts saying that pt shows good results in comparisons like that, apparently using a TTF font. Hopefully the bitmap font performance problem is not due to the general design, but a regression in a special case.
urxvt 0.233
gnome 0.474
st 0.515
xterm 1:13.87
I was expecting st to blow everything else away given its focus on minimalism, and what the hell is going on with xterm?
Another example: GNU vs BSD grep, from the author's mouth: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Aug...
Regex matching: https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html
(It's arguable that a backtracking implementation is not the simplest, although I think it is -- and even if it is, a FSA compiler clearly isn't!)
And, finally: people tell me Clojure is slow, and I tell them that it lets me write correct concurrent algorithms I understand. (See alioth shootout results.)
Note that while libvte seems to have greater throughput, its latency is terrible compared to xterm.