This, along with the generally accepted notion that Gnome Terminal is one of the slowest with output, puts the whole minimalism idea under a serious question. "Do one thing, but do it well", the saying goes.
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.