Re: Gnome 2.14 Module Proposal: Deskbar Applet

[Mike Hearn <mike plan99 net>]

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005 11:25:40 +0800, Davyd Madeley wrote:
> I don't think it is unacceptably high however. Has anyone profiled the
> usage of PyGTK applications. Can it be improved?

http://evanjones.ca/memoryallocator/

I'm not sure if any work has been done on this since PyCon 2005, but if
not then Python will always have problems. Summary of paper: its memory
allocator optimises for CPU speed over memory usage by never freeing
anything, instead it runs its own heaps which just grow and grow over
time. 

The garbage collector also has serious problems, for instance it's not
compacting so even if heap space could be returned to the OS often they
would not be due to fragmentation.

So assuming there has been no action on this front I guess
there are three ways to fix this:

 * Fix the Python interpreter to use a real compacting GC

 * Rewrite the applet in something other than Python and which
   isn't going to cause massive flamewars (which basically means
   C or C++)

 * Somebody could implement a Python-like language which compiles
   to native code. But then you'd have pretty much cloned Boo, and
   might as well be using Mono anyway.

thanks -mike