Re: disabling GTK+ features to shrink GTK+

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Sun, 2010-08-15 at 14:41 +0200, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> * Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> schrieb:
> 
> > because loading tons of small libraries is actually going to cost 
> > much more in terms of resources (memory, I/O, linking and loading time) 
> 
> Really ? did you measure it ?

it's been measured multiple times, on multiple platforms - especially on
embedded ones.

> How often do typically gtk applications get startet - how many 
> per second ?

that's absolutely inconsequential. *any* application linking to glib
and/or gtk+ would have that penalty - and the *fewer* applications (such
as your case) the worse it gets.

for better or worse, glib and gtk+ provide a platform (and ${DEITY}
knows how much I don't like that word); applications use the platform as
a whole or simply don't use it.

> Oh, btw, *If* you're really concerned about the dynamic linking
> overhead, wouldn't it be the right way to improve ldso in general,
> eg. by a kernel-based caching linker ?

feel free to poke the kernel and linker people to do it, then.

> > than loading a single library shared by many (if not all) applications.
> 
> Well, on my system, only a few apps need gtk, and most of them only
> small portions. You souldn't do the mistake of building everything
> on unrealistic assumptions like gtk is only used in "typical" GNOME
> environments.

oh, please. splitting up gtk and/or glib will yield the worst results on
small systems, and on systems that don't preload the whole stack - and
that even before hurting performance on a desktop GNOME installation.
after all, GNOME worked perfectly fine with dozens of little libraries
before. the performance gains in terms of environment start up time,
application start up time and memory usage have been documented and
verified.

> > for the past five years there has been an impressive effort in reducing
> > the amount of small libraries scattered across the platforms - 
> 
> Yes, that's exactly why I've given up gtk+ development.

then why do you feel entitled to spend time whining about gtk+'s
development?

ciao,
 Emmanuele.


-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi