Re: disabling GTK+ features to shrink GTK+

[Enrico Weigelt <weigelt metux de>]

* Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> schrieb:

> > Really ? did you measure it ?
> 
> it's been measured multiple times, on multiple platforms - especially on
> embedded ones.

URL ?

> > How often do typically gtk applications get startet - how many 
> > per second ?
> 
> that's absolutely inconsequential. 

No. We're talking about gtk here, not any arbitrary library somwhere.

> *any* application linking to glib and/or gtk+ would have that penalty 
> - and the *fewer* applications (such as your case) the worse it gets.

It gets worse because there's really a lot in this fat libraries
which only a small portion (or even none) of the installed 
applications really use.

> for better or worse, glib and gtk+ provide a platform (and ${DEITY}
> knows how much I don't like that word); applications use the platform as
> a whole or simply don't use it.

Aha, a fat thing, just like the .NET-platform, which you can either
eat or die, right ? Thanks, that makes the borderline clear.

Well, why not melting everything together, including the gnome stuff,
into one super-library, maybe even including the whole libc ? ;-o

> > Oh, btw, *If* you're really concerned about the dynamic linking
> > overhead, wouldn't it be the right way to improve ldso in general,
> > eg. by a kernel-based caching linker ?
> 
> feel free to poke the kernel and linker people to do it, then.

guess what, already working on that.

> > Well, on my system, only a few apps need gtk, and most of them only
> > small portions. You souldn't do the mistake of building everything
> > on unrealistic assumptions like gtk is only used in "typical" GNOME
> > environments.
> 
> oh, please. splitting up gtk and/or glib will yield the worst results on
> small systems, 

Do you have numbers ?
Some years ago (about when gtk2 came out), I've heavily trimmed it
down, removing everything that wasnt needed by the apps. On a P2 system
w/ ATA disks and 256M RAM, the overall system performance was about
10% faster.

> after all, GNOME worked perfectly fine with dozens of little libraries
> before. the performance gains in terms of environment start up time,
> application start up time and memory usage have been documented and
> verified.

Are we talking about gtk+ apps or the gnome environment at a whole ?
That are totally different issues. Gnome has a lot of other design
problems, which aren't scope of this list.


cu
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