[rescue] Re: [SunHELP] Solaris 9, First thoughts

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Sat, Jan 19, 2002 at 10:15:20PM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On January 19, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> > >   Inexperienced programmers with C++ compilers mean HUGE, SLOW CODE.
> > 
> > GNOME is 100% C.  Well, almost.  Some pieces use extensive guile, some 
> > extensive librep (Sawfish for instance), etc.  Gnome 1.0 was reasonably
> > fast.  CORBA through ORBit is being use a lot more now.  I don't know how
> 
>   This surprises me very, very much...it's SO huge and SO slow, I
> don't know how ANYONE can write C code like that.  It's doing a lot,
> but it's not like it's all THAT much.

Well, I haven't profiled it, so I'm just spitting ideas, but I think it might
have something to do with trying to use ORBit for message passing between 
objects rather than call them directly.  Or, maybe it has something to do 
with how sloppy they can be.  Alan Cox profiled one of the worst programs
(Nautilus) and found that it kept reloading the same font file hundreds and
hundreds of times.  I don't know what else could be causing problems, but
just watching the output from pan is extremely appaling.  In a typical pan
session, hundreds of asserts fail.

GTK tries to fake OO, but they do it by essentially making byte compatible 
structs (for instance, the first sizeof(GtkObject) bytes of GtkButton are 
structurally identical to GtkObject).  GTK performs decently in my opinion
though.
 
> > much this effects things.  I would expect that Sawfish would be pretty slow
> > since it is all interpretted lisp, but it actually seems to be one of the
> > faster/better pieces.
> 
>   Years ago on my first SPARC, a Sun4/110, I used a window manager
> called GWM.  This was something like 1991.  I recently rediscovered
> it, and I now have it running on my I^2.  It is blindingly fast and
> really cool.  It's built around a LISP dialect called WOOL.  It's no
> longer being maintained, but it works very well in its current
> release.  I'd love to pick it up and start maintaining it but I my
> brain doesn't work in a way that's compatible with LISP.  I hope to
> change that eventually, though.
> 
>   See http://koala.ilog.fr/gwm/.

I'll have to take a gander.  I really like the look and feel of windowmaker,
but I find projects like Sawfish, SCWM (Scheme Constraints Window Manager),
and now this to be highly alluring.

To say that lisp is slow is a misunderstanding.  In reality, there is little
reason that lisp can't be just as fast as C, if not faster.  It really just
depends on how dedicated you are to continueing to use lisp because to wring
the last bit of speed out, you have to do things like turn off GC and turn
off type checking and modify the compiler to use the latest sets of multimedia
instructions. 

This appears to be strictly interpretted though.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd