Re: Time to heat up the new module discussion

[Nate Nielsen <nielsen-list memberwebs com>]

Steve Frécinaux wrote:
> Iain * wrote:
> 
>>> 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?
>> As someone who is running mono based applications fairly regularly, I
>> haven't noticed any major performance issues. We're not talking here
>> about replacing the core libraries with c# based ones, we're talking
>> about applications, and for me the mono based apps are just as fast as
>> the C based ones.
> 
> I'm not really against having C# apps in the core (in fact I don't
> really mind), what I'm more frightening about is having applications
> that run all the time, using managed languages, and, as a consequence,
> taking up a fairly large amount of memory, from the computer start to
> the shutdown.
> 
> That's what I'm against including libraries, daemons or applets written
> either in C#, or in python, while having small apps you close once
> you're done (like alacarte) is fine.

Perhaps daemons, applets and core libraries should evaluated on their
performance merit independent of the language they're written in or the
framework that they use.

I'd imagine that those who have worked so hard on GNOME performance
issues would be disappointed if they saw a C applet take 18 - 20 megs
(resident) or take 10 seconds to load.

If the GNOME desktop becomes dependent on one single process like that,
it wipes out most of what so many people have worked hard step by step
to gain as far as startup speed and memory usage.

I don't think we should cut slack for a particular applet or daemon
because it happens to be written using an inefficient platform. If its
performance issues are not up to snuff, then it shouldn't be included as
part of the GNOME desktop.

That said, I bet the Mono guys could prove everyone wrong by optimizing
managed code to where it approaches the startup speed and memory usage
of lower level frameworks. That would be lovely. But it might mean not
trying to emulate every last 'innovation' in MS .NET C# 3.0 etc... :)

Cheers,
Nate