random update: i have wired fake-lighttable mode with thumbnails, to get a sense of speed there. still need to battle-test it with a few thousand images (wget -r raw.pixls.us or so).
rawspeed loading becomes a bottleneck during thumbnail creation. most of this could be i/o but it’s also an issue on my system with nvme ssd. need to experiment with interleaving disk io/cpu processing/gpu upload/gpu processing in multiple threads. loading a raw takes anything between 10–5000ms.
short video about image thumbnail list + entering darkroom mode (gui is completely constructed from scratch/config file for the specific processing graph which is loaded per image when you enter dr mode, also the whole full-res image is processed all the time, even when just panning around):
thumbnails are pre-created for this video (being lazy with threading i made a command line utility for this test). also you’ll see that it really isn’t a raw editor but a performance testing prototype (no colour management whatsoever, doesn’t clip negative values in noisy images, no highlight reconstruction, doesn’t even flip image orientation, thumbnails destroy aspect ratio, …).