RE: panel widget as library?

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, Fox, Kevin M wrote:

> Look at any corba book. It discusses not using massive amounts of
> function calls from a program to a corba server.

Structuring interfaces to avoid unnecessary operations is orthagonal to
how those operations get sent to the remote end. CORBA will _always_ be
slower than a hardcoded function call, even in the same address space,
because there is overhead.

> I am assuming from that, that most orbs use iiop to talk to one
> another.

Yes, that's the standard protocol.

> That would be slower than using some kind of direct method.

I'm not gathering what you mean by "direct", how IIOP is indirect, and how
a "direct" communications transport would be faster.

> Using a direct method between orbs would require a standard.
> Is there a standard for inter orb direct communication through shared
> memory or something similar for speed increases?

I still don't see any reasons given here for using shared memory. You
basically avoid a couple of memcpy's, and gain a lot of complexity from
having to manage shared memory segments in userland. You also need a
separate signalling mechanism to coordinate use of the information in the
shared memory segment.

> For example, libraries were chosen in the gconf project rather then corba
> objects for speed reasons. Are their reasons unfounded?

That's a totally different situation, where the features of CORBA aren't
needed. Havoc is using CORBA for communication between applications and
the config server, but there's no need for yet another layer between the
config server and various backends. He's following good programming
practices by using the right tool for the task.

-- Elliot
Who me? I just wander from room to room.