Nick Sabalausky wrote:
But it can add up. And I often wonder how much faster and more memory-efficient things like linux and the web could have been if they weren't so big on sticking damn near everything into "convenient" text formats.
Most programs only need to load up text on startup. So the cost of parsing the config file is linear in the number of times you start the application, and linear in the size of the config file.
If there were a binary database format in place of libraries, I would be fine with it, as long as there were a convenient way to get the textual version.
