Re: Time to heat up the new module discussion

[Ben Maurer <bmaurer andrew cmu edu>]

On Fri, 14 Jul 2006, [ISO-8859-1] Steve Frécinaux wrote:
> Ben Maurer wrote:
>
> > Please read my previous emails. Designing everything in C will not help.
> > Evolution, OpenOffice and Firefox are evidence that writing your app in
> > C does not make it memory efficient. In the long term, a moving GC may
> > be beneficial.
>
> Does "using a GC" really mean you have to use a big bloated
> memory-hungry virtual machine ?

Here we go with the "X is bloated" track again. I'm sure that gtk+ is very 
bloated because evolution is memory hungry.

> Well, no. Inkscape uses a GC, and it is
> written in C++.

It's fairly hard to do this. A moving gc in C++ would be even harder.

> If ever VM were able to share libs, it would be a great improvement, but
> currently they can't. It means the managed part of the code is loaded

Mono can do this. Read about AOT>

> for every managed app you launch. Which is far from optimal in the case
> of permanently running apps.

Even when we are not AOTing, the amount of ram dedicated to JITed code is 
small. If you are going to bitch, bitch with NUMBERS. The only performance 
data on this thread was the vmsize of a few applets, which means 
absolutely nothing.

Just as a number for starters: when launching banshee without AOT, it 
takes 600 kb of JITd code space. Let's say it's really more like 1 MB 
after lots of use (probably higher than it actually is). Maybe there are 4 
managed apps (Banshee, F-Spot, Beagle, Tomboy). That's 4 MB vs 1 MB if 
100% of it was shared as in C. Not a lot. In the long term, we'll probably 
get more of a win with compacting from a GC than this.

What's more: we can do better. When Mono improves it's code generation, 
every app benefits. In addition, AOT can reduce this problem.

> > At some point, we also have to realize that users with less memory do
> > need to make compermises. For example, such a user might want to choose
> > not to use Beagle.
>
> I don't use Beagle, and in fact I hope the alternate Tracker project
> will solve this problem. I don't use deskbar as well, nor banshee since
> the player is at the limit between a daemon and a classical app.

Just because GNOME has program X doesn't mean you have to use it. For 
example, having Evince doesn't prevent anyone from using acroread.

-- Ben