Hello:
I will start by the advantages of the modular approach:
- Memory usage reduction:
* Few Gtk+ or Qt main threads. Each main threads consume a
considerable amount of memory. Try build a simple application with an
only window, run it twice, measure its memory consumption. Then modify
the application to open two windows instead of one run it and measure
again you will notice the difference.
* Less data replication: The classical example to this is the
applications list, we have one for the panel, other for the runner and
even other inside th file manager.
- More application cohesion:
* Shared settings will not require IPC to get to the rest of the
desktop. By example changing the theme, right now, requires IPC to
notify the rest of desktop.
- More performance:
* Having less threads and less memory to manage will imply a
performance boost for the user. In my opinion this is the strongest
point of this approach.
As draw back we will have to deal with a module manager, nothing too
different from what we have in the panel.
Other considerations:
The desktop environment don't handle lots of data, perform complex
calculations or use critical data so there should not be a big issue an
occasional restart.
*This approach doesn't mean that we have to abandon the current* *one*.
As PcMan said they can coexist together and let the user to choose. This
is good also for the developers because we will able to test and measure
the applications standalone.
Cheers
Alexis López Zubieta
Nova Light Development Team
University of Informatics Sciences (Cuba)
El 20/11/13 07:53, Andrej N. Gritsenko escribió:
Hello!
Petr Vaněk has written on Wednesday, 20 November, at 9:00:
I'd play a devil's advocate here.
What's real profit of this potential move? (except "yeah, it looks cool")
They said - few MB of memory (well, in the best case, only if image
cache is cleared very often and fast) and also few milliseconds (time of
launching few PIDs) is the profit.
"We should just make sure modules never crash! ;-)" - it speaks for
itself = impossible.
After all the discussion I've read that restarting all the processes
is a mandatory thing (because they crash now and then) I can only laught
over "never crash". And yes, that will bring the problem of state saving
of all the components after each change (window resize, menu navigation,
etc.) wouldn't that create a too big impact on disk and therefore on
performance? And yes, state change is mandatory in library approach, just
a simple use-case: you type a program name in "Run..." dialog and your
screensaver was crashed. In case of standalone program that is not any
problem, it will be restarted, but in case of library you _should_ save
any letter typed in and enter them again after restart-of-all. :D
Will it make development easier? A standalone app can be started,
killed, run under gdb/valgrind (yes, I do it time by time). How can I
examine eg. panel library with valgrind in this lib-approach? Output
will be obfuscated by false positives from desktop etc...
It will make development a hell I believe. ;)
that's only what I can think about in few minutes... but it does not
mean I'm strictly against it. I'm just not a friend of "rapturous"
changes ;)
I'm second on that. Since I earn my life money by making software
(yep, I am a programmer), I can assure you - the worst way to make any
good software is to make it "all-in-one". Well, there are quite few
workarounds to make it (don't use shared libs but use dlopen() with
internal debug and crash handlers that will backtrace and unload the
crashed code, which involves also creating some envelopes to isolate
those dinamically loadable libraries), but that will make it too much
complex and inconvenient to develop. And despite the fact new PID takes
more resources I use execv() instead of pthread_create() for external
functionality when reliability is required. Well, if you create new
Windows, then make the DE a single application might be a choice, but
otherwise I'm highly against it. ;)
Cheers!
Andriy.
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