Memory consumption and virtual machines

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

The lovely smell of programming environment flame wars!

Part one ....

As the developer of an application that has an extremely high focus on
reduced memory consumption and as the author of a patch for Camel that
reduced Evolutions memory footprint with ~40 MB (maybe more, but that
number I'm certain of) . . . 

I hereby officially write: If tinymail would have been written in a high
level language like Python OR .NET, its memory consumption wouldn't
increase to a level of not being usable for its target audience.

I could have done tinymail in .NET (or Python) and let it run under the
Mono virtual machine (or the Python one) on the Nokia 770 device.

I "officially" regret the fact that I didn't. I have no reason not to do
tinymail in for example .NET (I don't like Python, but that says
something about me and my development methods, not about Python).

Don't force me to use Python because Python was so-called "the first
higher language" for the GNOME platform. Definitely not all developers
like "the Python style" of software development. Definitely not!


Part two ....

The few megabytes of memory added by a virtual machine, is insignificant
to the current total amount of memory our GNOME desktop consumes.

Take for example Evolution. Using ONE WEEK of hacking, I managed to
reduce its memory footprint with at least 40 MB of ram.  I have a
question for you guys. How many virtual machines fit in that 40MB?

Everybody who's interested in getting the memory usage of GNOME down:
please focus on "quality code" in stead of trying to tell us virtual
machines are the reason.

They aren't. WE, the developers, are THE reason.

Don't blame technology. Blame yourself.


Please do not reply to this message on the mailing list. It's not
intended to be your flame war offset. You can reply me in private.

-- 
Philip Van Hoof, software developer at x-tend 
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
work: vanhoof at x-tend dot be 
http://www.pvanhoof.be - http://www.x-tend.be