Re: [Deskbar] Re: Gnome 2.14 Module Proposal: Deskbar Applet

[Mark Rosenstand <mark borkware net>]

On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 16:51:09 +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-10-27 at 15:39 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> > Benoît Dejean wrote:
> > > Le jeudi 27 octobre 2005 à 13:32 +0100, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
> > > a écrit :
> > > 
> > >>Qui, 2005-10-27 às 11:05 +0200, Benoît Dejean escreveu:
> > >>  The result: a single process (per user, per display), and a
> > >> single
> > >>main loop, for all applets.  Of course this means if one applet
> > >>deadlocks or dies, they all die.  But at least dying in python is
> > >>not so easy.  You usually get only an exception that is ignored.
> > >>Deadlock is easier if they use threads.
> > > 
> > > 
> > > We don't do it for C applets because if "one applet deadlocks or
> > > dies, they all die". But thanks for raising the problem of many
> > > VM-based applets : currently, 3 applets would take ~ 50MB of RES
> > > memory.
> > > 
> > >
> > 
> > Yes the real problem with panel applets is that they are out of
> > process apps which regardless of the language they are written in
> > are always going to be inefficient memory wise to some degree even
> > when written in C.
> > 
> > The best solution is to run all panel apps in-process in their own 
> > threads (IE make a panel applet a GTKWidget that's threadsafe). We
> > also get rid of Corba/bonobo by doing so which is always a plus.
> > The drawbacks as stated should not really be a problem if the
> > applets are properly debugged (at least so they dont seg fault)
> > 
> as a first step, doing all applets .so bonobo components instead of
> processes should save a lot of memory also.
> 
> There's always though the problem that if one applet crashes, all the
> panel would crash

My apologies to the concerned developers (that would be vuntz, right?)
for saying this, but at least on my computers the panel crashes once in
a while anyway. Not that I plaise the idea of not having applets run as
processes, because I think it brings the flexibility that makes
nicities such as deskbar-applet possible, but I just don't think that
the panel crashing is /that/ big a disaster.