[maemo-developers] python Re: [maemo-developers] Maemo 2.0 final release available

[From: Tommi Komulainen]

On Mon, 2006-07-10 at 09:29 -0300, ext Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri wrote:
> On 7/10/06, Frantisek Dufka <dufkaf at seznam.cz> wrote:
> > As for the horrible startup time even applications written in C start
> > slowly but python is really much worse. Yesterday I tried the runtime in
> > 2.0 repository with simple examples copied from
> > http://www.maemo.org/platform/docs/pymaemo/python_maemo_howto.html and
> > it is not very usable in current state. Those simple hello world apps
> > start  approx. 4 seconds for the first time when python is not in file
> > cache and approx. 2 seconds for second time. This is too much to be
> > usable IMHO.

Oh, it's only 4 seconds. I was under the impression it would be closer
to 10. It's not *that* bad then :)


> When you do write code in C, it will evaluate gtk_$CLASS_type() just
> for used classes. But for PyGTK, it used to evaluate this for _EVERY_
> class available, doing a lot of branches, function calls, memory
> allocation, ... This seems to be fixed in PyGTK CVS with "lazy
> evaluation" patch.

Ouch! Another contributing factor is probably the number of local
symbols in _gtk.so that need to be relocated.


> So far there is no optimization of this kind.
> I do plan to write a pythonserver, in the same fashion as wineserver
> or kdeinit. A process that would link to _gtk.so and _hildon.so, when
> you use python (in client form) it would just call the server and it
> will fork() (sure, doing the right thing for stdin/stdout). However
> this is not done at the moment.

We have maemo-launcher :)
https://stage.maemo.org/svn/maemo/projects/haf/trunk/maemo-launcher/

Or, assuming that 95% of the time python on 770 would be used for GUI
applications (rather than daemons, scripts or such) linking pygtk and
pyhildon statically with python might be wortwhile optimization.
Licenses permitting, of course.


-- 
Tommi Komulainen                            <tommi.komulainen at nokia.com>