Re: Some comments

[Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com>]

On Sun, May 20, 2001 at 03:13:22PM +1200, Nicholas Lee wrote:
>    Is there a reason it takes so much memory?  I have 200K on disk
> sheets blow out to 80Mb (according to top) on load and 110Mb after a
> few saves.  These are spreadsheets with multiple sheets.
There was a bug in recent versions that lead to severe style
fragmentation when dealing with styles for full columns.  It has
been fixed and the patch will be in the next release.

>   Saving/loading in native format is slower than to/from XLS format.  I
> assume this is a libxml problem.  This is a esp a problem with the
> memory size above, makes my 192Mb laptop start to thrash with other apps
> loaded.  Not good when you want to shut down quickly.
This is partially true.  There are 2 factors at play.
1) Using the DOM interface to libxml.  This is a bad idea.  It
balloons the memory usage by parsing the entire xml document into
memory generating all of the libxml data structures then parsing
that.  There is work on a replacement xml parser that is sax based.
it is much faster.

2) Our xml format currently only saves the expression, not the last
calculated result.  This gives the XL interface an advantage in that
it does not need to do a full recalc.

>   There seems to be no way to scroll though the sheets if you have to
> many.  ie the tabs for the sheets at the bottom go pass the end of the
> window. 
A small bug that crept in 0.64.  It has been fixed.  The patch will
be in the next release.

>   Is there a generic way to write functions?  (ie user defined
> custom_fn().)  
C, guile, and  python are all available and the interface is very
well defined.  Have a look in the plugins directory for samples.

Now all I need to do is whip automake into shape to get the release
out tonight.