On Wed, May 04, 2011 at 06:58:33PM +0200, Vincent van Ravesteijn wrote: > > > > > > I think that more attention should be put in the memory footprint. I have > > the impression that LyX is becoming a bloatware. > > > > > Apart from which features are (un)necessary, can you say where you think > that we should look first to improve on the subject ? Do you think existing > features can be made simpler, or do you think that there are mistakes in the > code, or something else ?
Again, I am not going to point the finger against something in particular. I would like that major attention be paid to the increasead bloat with respect to the benefits that come from a particular feature. As it is clear that I was against the export in thread/qprocess features, I will take this as an example. When I export or preview something in LyX, I simply wait (only for some seconds!) the end of the operation. So, the fact that I can still tinker with the keyboard has no value. I gained nothing from this, but there's something that I lost? A lot! - Much time spent in debugging/fixing related bugs - An increased memory footprint due to cloning etc. - Missing ability to use batch files on native Windows - Missing ability to use a chain of converters through pipes - Missing ability to kill converters if they got stalled. You have to wait for a timeout and cannot kill them because they are in a thread of your same process. - Memory fragmentation caused by converters that now don't run as separate processes anymore. In conclusion, those features are simply bloatware to me. No advantages, a lot of disadvantages. Was the export in thread really *needed*? No! Was qprocess really *needed*? No for all platforms, except (maybe!) Windows where the command line is frowned upon. But could have it be implemented in a saner way, not so harmful for the other platforms? Certainly yes, but there was that cool qprocess thingie in Qt, how to resist? -- Enrico
