Re: idea - gnome app fast loading

[Michael Zucchi <zucchi zedzone mmc com au>]

Hmm, this wont work, if you fork, it'll be exactly the same as it
works now, because the processes can't share resources.

And if you dont fork, then you'll have problems with per-process
resources (like file descriptors), it'll have to be multithreaded, and
applications could stomp on each other (this worked ok enough on the
Amiga, but the code had to be tight ... actually this is why it is
frugal with resource usage - themable widgets, multimedia and sound
all running happily in 1MB, with the desktop and some applications
running).

Hmm, of course if it were done right it might be useful for other
reasons though (embedding, remote-invocation, task-migration?).  But
this is getting into the component area.

 Michael

> Thinking along the lines of an applet issue that recently crossed the
> lists...  why not make every GNOME app a shared library?
> 
> I think this would save a lot of memory and startup time, though there
> may be security implications.
> 
> Most GNOME apps don't have any special startup requirements; they just
> init the gettext library, call gnome_init(), and then begin their setup.
> 
> I propose that GNOME apps be compiled as shared libraries, with each's
> main() becoming gnome_main().  The main() is provided by a generic
> driver, which simply calls gnome_main(), and links with all the proper
> libraries.
> 
> GNOME-aware programs can fork and dlopen the shared lib, and
> GNOME-unware programs continue to execute the driver binary, which
> simply references the shared lib containing the real code.
> 
> Comments?

-- 
     ///   `... thinking is an exercise to which all too few brains
    ///     are accustomed.' - First Lensman, E.E. `Doc' Smith
\\\///  
 \\\/   Michael Zucchi, B.E.                 zucchi@zedzone.mmc.com.au