Re: [Gimp-developer] Reducing Load Time

[Alexia Death <alexiadeath gmail com>]

On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 2:37 PM, Srihari Sriraman <srihari29691 gmail com> wrote:
> Is it possible to implement this change before the release of 2.8?
> or is it too late?

The window to get new features into 2.8 closed long ago.

Lazy loading has been on the table for as long as I have been with the
project, but it has never been important enough or desired enough to
attract a developer to actually implement it and its not a trivial
change to do so its actually beneficial. One of the main catches is
that for most brushes, to get/generate the preview you need to load it
at least once. And once you have loaded it whats the point of dropping
it again? Way around it would be to cache previews, but then you would
need to manage that collection, keep it in sync with what is and isn't
on the disc etc. Whole bunch of complications making the effort spent
greater than the benefits. I think last time it came up the
recommended solution for these problems was a resource manager that
would let users load and unload resource collections on demand and
simply limiting the resources loaded at startup. This is something
that could even be implemented as a plugin.

-- 
--Alexia