On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 11:50:05AM -0500, Pierre Phaneuf wrote:
> Ari Heitner wrote:
>
> > I mean "COM is always wrong" in the context of "wanting COM for Unix so we
> > can make Unix just like Windows, with no consideration of what is
> > braindamaged about Windows/MSCOM is always wrong".
>
> YES. Keep thinking, at all time!
>
> There are some good things with Windows, just not enough that I can use
> it without risking permanent nerve damages. :-)
>
> In some aspects, Windows 95/98 seems much lighter than a Linux running
> GNOME for example. MSIE 5.5 is also much faster than Mozilla (opens up
I'm not sure I buy that. Some aspects of GNOME are a bit heavy. But I think
the core libraries are similarly light. Win95 of course will be a total
bitch if you install too much stuff -- no control over startup or what runs
when. MS in general is very bad at keeping system architecture stuff simple
and transparent (i.e. scripted).
> in about 1 second on a Pentium 166 with 24 megs of RAM), to hit the nail
They're cheating. They preload that sucker to make sure it's always fast. I
don't think it'll run any more happily than mozilla on a low-mem machine.
> on the head, and quite modular (IEXPLORE.EXE itself is 60kb).
Don't be fooled. That's just the stub. The actual DLL is a good couple of
megs. Go by memory size: IE 5 is about 15 megs, to mozilla's 20, at startup.
In general IE stays ahead by a few megs (but not much) during run.
Unfortunately there's no good way (i know of) to get around that -- a lot of
it is cost of rendering bitmaps right and left into memory, and assembling
page chunks. Yucky. Web browsers are memory hogs. If you want something
light, use links or w3m :)
Not that I wouldn't be charmed to see mozilla cut down its initial memory
image size a bunch :)
>
> I'm not bashing Mozilla here, just saying that they must be doing
> *something* right, so pissing on everything they do is definitely wrong.
The main thing they're doing right is playing the closed-source game -- see
ESR and RMS on this. They've got everyone by the balls, quite frankly. It
would be (imho) failing due diligence for any CTO to fail to keep every
outsourced technology his business depends on Open ...
> > And I have *zero* problem with COM on Unix as long as it maintains sane Unix
> > paradigms -- things like "only programs running as root can modify
> > system-wide settings" and "general libraries are provided by the system;
> > applications can specify dependencies, but don't get to mess with the
> > available libraries, except in their own out-of-the-way places".
>
> Didn't rayw had something on searchable paths for component modules?
Can you give me a pointer on this? Sound right up my alley...
>
> When components have state, things go sour for good old Unix sanity...
Indeed :)
ari
