Comment 2 for bug 172064

Originator: NO

"porting" all of Inkscape to OS X is a huge task. Inkscape relies on GTK
and the equivalent of GTK on OS X is Cocoa, which is very different from
GTK. There are two drawbacks in Inkscape not being native:
1- speed and memory usage: Inkscape loads all the libraries it needs when
it starts, this includes GTK in particular and many other libraries. By
comparison to Linux, it takes more time and memory because on a Linux
desltop, all these libraries would already be active and shared on a Linux
desktop.
2- display: Inkscape uses X11 and X11 on OS X is not optimal (because it
is old). Although, on recent machines, the display is usually fast enough
to be very workable. I use Inkscape everyday and it's mostly fine

problem 2 may be solved soon, if more people help to port GTK to OS X
(this is mostly done). problem 1 however will likely never be solved unless
Inkscape is "librairized" much and someone rewrites and interface in Cocoa
from scratch... and that won't be me ;)