Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME

[Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org>]

On Fri, 2010-03-05 at 07:51 -0500, Jim Gettys wrote:

I'm doing a huge [CUT] here, I hope you don't mind?

> People like Google work *hard* on latency and understand 
> every byte counts (among many other things: go look at the google talks 
> by their engineers on the topic).

In my opinion you solve latency more by making services capable of
pipelining, than by compressing data. And by making clients that make
use of the remote service's pipelining capabilities.

The perceived latency will include the time to decompress the compressed
chunks (when using a compression algorithm instead of code obfuscating,
like they do with javascript as you point out), but I'll agree that this
is negligible compared to average network latency. Especially on 3G,
UMTS and (all) other mobile network protocols.

In other words:

UI and client developers should learn to build state machines instead of
threads that work like (where [...] is ~ an IP frame):

"[ask], wait, [receive], process, [ask], wait, [receive], process"

Instead of that, do this:

"[ask ask ask] [receive receive], process, process, [receive], process"

An example of this is Dave Cridland's Polymer and Telomer.

This, however, isn't always simple with the newest "HTML5 + Javascript"
technologies. Meaning that GNOME's desktop technologies has an advantage
here.

Especially for mobile is this interesting (where from quite some time to
come, network latency will be the problem numero uno).

I'm guessing Google has components and development tools for this in
their Weave stuff? They are catching up! ;)

> Right now, these are two disincentives for the source code to be 
> available at all.
> 
> As a solution to 2), Gnome (and/or the FSF) could work in the web 
> community to standardize mechanisms and code for making such source 
> available.  So long as solutions to 2) do not exist, we're in a much 
> poorer position; free and open source code should not work *worse* than 
> proprietary, IMHO.

I agree.

> I'm concerned to have not seen this sort of strategic issue discussed 
> widely.

Me neither, although GIO's newest GNIO and the bug about TLS encryption
support is *very* promising and going in the right direction, I think.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=588189


Cheers,


Philip

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Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
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