Re: Independent image loaders in gdk-pixbuf

[Matthias Clasen <maclas gmx de>]

On Sun, 2002-09-22 at 04:01, Jody Goldberg wrote:

> I did not read the patch, but would appreciate an overview of the
> run time cost of finding the available set of loaders.  What handles
> the registry ?

There is an external utility, gdk-pixbuf-queryloaders, which must be
rerun whenever a new loader is installed. It dumps a list of available
loaders into a text file, which gdk-pixbuf parses only once, so I would
say that the runtime overhead is pretty minimal. 

Finding a loader matching a given image has become a little bit more
expensive: The old code just tried the existing loaders in a fixed order
and used the first match. Since we can't control the order of the
loaders anymore, we now always have to test all loaders and select the
best match. So installing hundreds of loaders for exotic image formats
will slow down png loading a bit, but this scenario is probably not
realistic... 

Matthias