Re: Number of dynamically linked libraries (Was: Re: Gtk+4.0)

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 05:19:19PM +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
> On 22/06/16 13:14, Sébastien Wilmet wrote:
> > Time for another Project Ridley?
>
> Maybe; or maybe the benefit of those 30 extra libraries outweighs their
> cost (CPUs are faster now than in the GNOME 2 days after all), but we
> still shouldn't introduce more without good reasons.
>
> If there is a compelling advantage to splitting up libraries, of course,
> by all means do so.
>
> > And it doesn't count the dlopen'ed libraries, like for the GIO extension
> > points.
>
> The application potentially has an opportunity to provide feedback to
> the user before it loads all of those, at least.
>
> "Properly linked" hard dependencies seem likely to be a bigger issue for
> GUI responsiveness than dlopen'd modules and *their* dependencies,
> because we can't display anything (not even an empty window) until ld.so
> has finished thinking about the relocations for hard dependencies, and
> handed over control to main().

So, if someone wants to optimize application startup time, the features
that rely on a GIO extension point can be initialized later, after the
window is shown.

Or maybe some extension points could be replaced by swallowing the lib
into GIO.

--
Sébastien