Re: official support for more scripting languages in gnome needed

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, Paolo Molaro wrote:

[snip stuff about disk usage]

> And now to some other issues:
> 
> Loading speed in ms (on my K6 400 with 128 MB RAM):
> The python program are 'from gtk import *' and 'from gnome.ui import *'.
> The perl programs are 'perl -MGtk=-init -e 0' and 
> 'perl -MGnome -e "init Gnome $0"'.
> 
> 	python	perl
> gtk     0.715	0.680	(took the best result for python and the worse for
> 			perl in a number of runs each after a find /)
> gtk
> cached  0.715	0.280  (values taken after running the same program a few 
> 			times, best value for python, worst for perl: the
> 			average for perl is about 0.230)
> gnome   1.083	0.777	(same as above for the Gnome support)
> gnome
> cached  1.085	0.379

The current python bindings do have a number of problems, which have
improved on the HEAD branch.  Those changes do improve startup time and
memory usage.

I was originally going to target these changes at gtk 1.2, but decided
instead to use them for the gtk 2.0 version after discussions with various
people.  The changes were quite extensive, and making things compatible
with previous versions would take a lot of effort.  That is why I have
left the 1.2 targeted branch with the current (sub optimal) architecture.

I suppose this is another vote for regular updates to the development
platform is a good thing.  It allows maintainers can phase out old
versions of libraries with architectural issues which can't be fixed
without breaking compatibility.

Just out of interest, are those times for startup only, or startup and
shutdown?

> So, the perl binding loads 3 times faster when there is an already running
> interpreter. It would be interesting to have the numbers for smaller
> machines, though.

Some of the improvements in head pygtk come from having less python code
in the binding, and implementing more in the C extension.  This also
increases the number of pages that can be shared between processes.

[snip]
> 
> lupus (who is trying to provide numbers and not to start flamewars:-)

sounds like the perl bindings are going really well.


James.

-- 
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/