Re: official support for more scripting languages in gnome needed

[Paolo Molaro <lupus ximian com>]

On 03/18/01 Ben Ford wrote:
> Scripting languages have their place.  I don't dispute that.  I use automake as

One of their place is writing Gnome apps:-)

> much as the next guy.  But I don't (and won't) run perl applets.  Maybe one of
> them doesn't slow you down that much, but you get two or three of them and it
> will.  Already I can't run more than a few applets w/ my PII450 w/ 192 RAM
> without seeing a big speed drop.  So it's not the greatest box around, but it's

I do all my development and I use all the time a K6 400 with 128 MB RAM:
it's not a slow pc, but it's also very hard to find a slower one
on the market:-)
The time to start a Gnome/Perl applet is:

$ time perl -MGnome::Applet -e 'init Gnome::AppletWidget $0'

real	0m0.392s
user	0m0.320s
sys	0m0.030s

while an equivalent C program takes:

$ time ./applet

real	0m0.235s
user	0m0.170s
sys	0m0.030s

So a whole 160 milliseconds more than a C program.
Once the program is loaded the language speed is not an issue as many others
already pointed out. So speed is not an issue at all here (at least for
the perl binding:-). Memory usage is a bit higher. though with your PC
you should be able to run about 60 perl applets more than me according
to my memory usage statistics (ie the perl binding memory requirement
for a full gnome application is about 1 meg more than the equivalent
C app). Just pointing out some facts here: I'm all for reducing speed
and memory tradeoffs in the language bindings, I try to do it whenever
I can.

Wild guess of the day: Gnome 2.0 will have as many compiled programs
as "interpreted" ones. Gnome 3.0: people will ask why do we need to
install the C libraries if no program uses them? (the answer is that they
are used by the language bindings themselves:-)

lupus (gnome-perl maintainer)

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