Re: Time to heat up the new module discussion

[Alvaro Lopez Ortega <alvaro 0x50 org>]

Ben Maurer wrote:

>> It makes sense to me that Mono should remain on the out-skirts of
>> GNOME for this very reason - core GNOME should only use native
>> languages, and more specifically C, as to to do otherwise is likely
>> to effect the already perceived poor performance of GNOME.
>
> Excess memory usage has not stoped us from using alot of things --
> VFS, Bonobo, etc. Many of the other modules under consideration add
> their own memory usage to the base desktop -- for example, accepting
> power manager gives us yet another daemon which takes up a few megs
> of ram. Distros are being even more aggressive about adopting these
> new programs (network manager, notification daemon).

  It is a very different situation. While the power manager support
  provides new functionality, GTK# would only provide duplicate
  functionality for another development framework that overlaps with
  GNOME.

>>  - It starts a C# based applet - and this pulls in Mono, which I'm
>>    sure isn't that small, but I guess at least it does share memory
>>    better than Python, but there is still quite a lot of additional
>>    memory pulled in.
>
> Mono does *quite* a bit better than python in terms of memory for a
> Gtk# application (vs pygtk).

  We should not even care about which one is less hoggy.  This is a
  base problem: "Do we need two (or more) development frameworks for a
  single desktop?".

  My opinion is no, we don't. But anyway, if in the worst case we end
  up using another one, lets ensure it's that, another one, not two or
  three of them.

>> As for .NET, even Microsoft themselves had to pull back from using
>> it for core functionality due to performance reasons - why do we
>> think we will do any better?
>
> Attributing this to performance alone is over simplifying. Vista
> clearly has some high performance requirements. IMHO, part of the
> issue was that rewriting existing code wasn't the way to get Vista
> out the door. We aren't doing that, and I don't think we should.

  http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1820607,00.asp

======
Everything in Longhorn was supposed to be written in C# and to be
managed code. But managed code was going to require machines that
weren't going to be available for five years or more. So now Microsoft
is rewriting everything in Longhorn, the developer says. Developers
claim that the Windows team actually began rethinking Microsoft's .Net
Framework
======

  As Darren said, why do we think we will do any better?

>> I'm sure there are more breakdowns possible - I just think an ISV
>> or 3rd party developer should be able to express their dependencies
>> for their application by saying they need GNOME Core or GNOME Mono.
>
> I'm not really aware of the issues and problems in this
> area. However, this doesn't seem to relate to the ideas about
> performance earlier in the email.

  Yeah, the performance is not the only issue about accepting GTK# and
  Mono. There are many.

> I also think our guidelines should be less strict on applications not
> launched by default. If Tomboy is added as a non-default application, we
> needn't be as strict about memory usage.

  If a non-default application is an app that is installed with the
  default desktop, I completely agree. Actually, in my opinion those
  apps should never depend on a secondary frameworks.

-- 
Greetings, alo.
http://www.alobbs.com