On Sat, 30 Nov 2002, guy keren wrote:
>
> On Thu, 28 Nov 2002, Shlomi Fish wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 28 Nov 2002, guy keren wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > On Thu, 28 Nov 2002, Alexander Maryanovsky wrote:
> > >
> > > > When do you know you're talking to an open source supporter?
> > > > When he's looking for alternatives to *Mozilla* :-)
> > >
> > > the fact that something is open-source, doesn't have to mean its a
> > > resource hog. and mozilla is a great resource hog, and so is KDE. and
> > > unlike various movie playing software - they don't _have_ to be such
> >> resource hogs. just that nobody cares enough to make them less 'hoggish'.
> > >
> >
> > I beg to differ. Mozilla has to support a lot of things: all the HTML
> > versions (2.0, 3.2, 4.0, 4.01, XHTML ), broken HTML, CSS, images, the XUL
> > portable GUI library, java and Flash applets, JavaScript, many protocols
> > (all versions of HTTP, FTP, gopher, etc), XML and XSL and the other W3C
> > inventions, and possibly other things I forgot. It needs to be bloated if
> > it wishes to support all of those things, and with the advancement of W3C
> > standards, the situation is only getting worse.
>
> when i say something is bloated, i mean it takes too many resources. as
> you quite well know, two programs doing the same things can use different
> ammounts of resources. in fact, the same program can do the same thing in
> two manners - one optimized and one not.
>
There are several levels of optimizations that can be done to a program.
Often, there is a memory/speed trade-off. In case, you machine has little
memory, than less memory will also mean greater speed.
> the problem with bloatware is not the fact they try to do too much - but
> rather that they don't give a time to make sure they don't waste
> resources. i'll call upon your own pet to show that - you modified your
> algorithms and data structures several times, not to gain new
> funcitonality, but rather to make it run faster. you did it because you
> cared about its resource use (a CPU is a resource, too).
>
I modified the program to run faster and also to consume less memory
(which indirectly made it run faster). However, some of the techniques I
used are quite unorthodox, and complicated the code. I can allow myself to
do that in Freecell Solver which is a subsystem with a limited
functionality that I can optimize to death upon my whims.
However, the Mozilla project has a lot of functionality, and I'm not sure
how well they can optimize it without sacrificying simplicity, clarity of
the code, and the straightforwardness of embedding it.
I would not recommend some of the optimization I did for Freecell Solver
for a large scale project with a lot of functionality where performance on
old hardware was not that critical.
> the kde folks went over board with things, without caring if it runs on
> older hardware - hence, the bloat. when you have a new PC that runs very
> fast, you can loose awareness to how bloated your code is. i just bought a
> new computer a week ago, and suddenly things run fat, that i don't feel
> the bloat on every spot - suddenly netscape 6 launches quickly. suddenly
> galeon does not slag behind. so you see - if i was developing on this new
> PC, it would hardly run on older hardware, cause i wouldn't _feel_ the
> bloat. only if i care about it, or try it on older hardware, will i notice
> this bloat properly, and be reminded to keep my code optimized.
>
Naturally. (I believe we discussed it, and later I posted it to
Hackers-IL). The question is of course, how much the KDE, Mozilla or
whatever people care about performance on older hardware. In Freecell
Solver, I am competing for speed against other solvers, so every
optimization counts. But if you want your code to be more maintainable,
then it is highly possible that you rule that it will not function
properly with a slow CPU or a computer that does not have a lot of memory.
This is a legitimate decision.
Of course it amazes me a bit: a Pentium 100 MHz computer is as fast as a
Cray 1 supercomputer, and has more memory. Modern computers are faster by
a few factors. And still, developers seem to find ways to code programs
that require more than that. It is possible that sometimes developers
don't take the time to implement good optimizations that will improve
speeed or memory consumption drastically, but will not make the program
more complicated.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
> --
> guy
>
> "For world domination - press 1,
> or dial 0, and please hold, for the creator." -- nob o. dy
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
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"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"
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