Widget class loading (was: Re: relase plan, 1st draft)

[Joern Reder <joern zyn de>]

Göran Thyni wrote:

> Gtk2.pm will be BIG!
> and it will bootstrap *a lot* of functions from C.
>
> I think it will still kill startup performance.
> Careful evaluation will be needed before
> making a change like that.
> The balance is between convenience for the developer
> and performance for the user (as always).

What about such a solution: each widget class is derived from 
Gtk2::Loader (probably a bad name, but Ok for this mail ;)

It has a 'new' subroutine (and probably other different named 
constructor subroutines) like this:

  sub new {
    my $class = shift;
    require $class; # or: eval "use $class"; die $@ if $@;
    $class->new(@_);
  }

Gtk2.pm sets the @ISA array of all widget classes to qw(Gtk2::Loader) 
and loads Gtk2::Loader. So when constructing a widget object, 
Gtk2::Loader's constructor is accessed first, which loads the real code
and then executes the widget's constructor. Subsequent calls will find 
the widget's constructor first, and everything should work with good 
performance and as expected.

Just a quick born idea, maybe it doesn't work, because I missed 
something essential (also I don't know much about Gtk2's internals). 
Just tell me ;)

BTW: how did the Gtk module solved this problem?

Regards,

Joern

-- 
Joern Reder
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