Re: Extensions Infrastructure Work

[John Stowers <john stowers lists gmail com>]

On Thu, 2011-06-23 at 11:48 +0200, ecyrbe wrote:
> thank you john for the bits of history of the design.
> i do know about server programming, as in fact it's my job to make
> high load servers in c++.
> i also understand the design better and the solution you try to
> provide.
> 
> as i said. you can make the server lightweight inside the shell, i
> don't think people would complain as this would make it a lighter
> solution than a separate daemon.
> The problem with a separate daemon, is that you end up using a process
> to do nothing 99% of the time. integrating it in the shell would make
> it :
> - leightweight -> you only add a listening port to gnome-shell.
> - integrated -> you don't need to add a dbus api to control extension
> enabling/disabling
> - easy to implement -> you only have to use libsoup asynchronously, no
> threading use
> - no memory overhead -> it's integrated in the shell , you don't have
> to allocate a new stack for it
> 
> so, why not integrate it? why would people complain ?

Cool. As an engineer you probably also understand that one does not
always start with the perfect implementation.

Pragmatically the separate process HTTP server is not bad for a first
go.

I'm still not convinced a process that is sleeping 99% is a big deal. It
should be swapped out and take no resources.

John