On Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 10:25:56PM +0700, Robert Elz <kre@munnari.OZ.AU> wrote:
| * Abandon binary files
No. The text files require too much knowledge and processing. As long
Nowadays, an X11 terminal emulator (say, i18n-ized rxvt) takes up to 0.5s of startup time on my 2ghz opteron, which is a fast cpu. This is actually somewhat slower than the startup times on, say, my pentium in 1996, although one would have expected an order of magnitude faster startup. I once tried to find out why that is happening. I found the reason for that slowdown is that libc/libX11/Xt etc. now parses a lot of files it didn't parse before, such as the Compose table (which also increased in size), lots of application-defaults files and more. (Of course, I get vastly more functionality, too). Although each of these files can be parsed very quickly, all of them together eat considerable time and memory resources. So while, personally, I prefer text over binary formats, I do so only for ease of development. However, there already is a binary format for timezone info, and before abandoning that I'd prefer good arguments. The argument "it doesn't seem to be a problem nowadays" doesn't sound good enough for it, as parsing time and memory required is not trivial, and while it itself is not a problem, it adds to an already existing problem. "Vastly more functionality" would be a better argument, but this doesn't seem to be achievable. (Another case in point is gnu libc's locale management, which a) converts text to binary representation and b) caches frequently-used locales in a special database, as loading even the pre-parsed binary format was slow). Just my 0.02ยข, of course. -- The choice of a -----==- _GNU_ ----==-- _ generation Marc Lehmann ---==---(_)__ __ ____ __ pcg@goof.com --==---/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / http://schmorp.de/ -=====/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ XX11-RIPE