Freedesktop.org on KDE/Gnome, New Goals

fdo writes "OSNews has a long and juicy interview with the freedesktop.org developers regarding many aspects of their project, including interoperability between GNOME/KDE, the new X Server, the new Hardware Abstraction Layer library, accessibility, package management and in general, all things desktop."

Re:GUI toolkit libraries

[IamTheRealMike]

I don't recall where I last posted one, I think OSNews but it's pretty hard to find individual posts there.

Basically:

* OpenOffice really (ab)uses shared libraries heavily. It has over a hundred of them, all internal. Worse they are all C++ so there are lots of symbols. On a typical OpenOffice Writer startup, over 1.7 million string comparisons are performed in the dynamic linker alone.

* MS Word has been heavily optimized so that the minimum number of page faults necessary are used to get the user to the first screen. This involves some clever analysis tools, support from the toolchain etc - MS Visual C++ produces very compact and tight code, so fewer disk accesses are needed for the same amount of code. Modern application startup time is mostly a matter of disk IO once other factors (such as synchronous waits on servers starting up) have been removed.

* OpenOffice drags in an entire framework and object model, whereas MS Office reuses at least COM and the registry (though not the widget toolkit to some extent). Dragging the entire VCL and SAL into memory takes time.

* Microsofts employees have the issues related to startup time drummed into them, free software developers do not. They understand techniques like rearranging the layout of your code so commonly used objects and functions are grouped together, how to optimize the CPU working set and so on.

For OpenOffice the biggest issue is still fixup time. Red Hat and Ximian are looking into that, there are techniques you can use (symbol hiding in particular) that can speed up the time taken to load large C++ shared libraries like that. Prelink will also help.

Re:We're not just talking Windows

[Minna Kirai]

Because Microsoft bundled crucial functions in Windows 3.1 which Microsoft Office could use, but competitor's applications (Lotus 123 and Wordperfect) could not.

Wow! People are moderating this down. It's as if they don't know. Maybe those of you who can't remember the 80s are ignorant of this, so I'll spell it out for the youngsters:

1. Microsoft Windows 3.1 included secret API calls which only Microsoft-employees knew. So while Lotus and Wordperfect were struggling to get their apps to work decently under the crummy non-multitasking half-32 bit pseudo-OS, the developers of Excel and Word could concentrate on usability features customers wanted.

This story was well-known at the time; all the big PC magazines covered it. I guess nobody will believe me now... it was too long ago to be reported on the web. And if I can't provide a link, it must mean I'm lying!