On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 05:09:25PM +0100, Max Kellermann wrote: > You are not required to link the C++ library if you don't use it. No > overhead here.
Assuming you have a recent OS, like Linux, Solaris, etc.: If you're running any other programs that are written in C++ then the C++ library will already be in memory and shared between processes so it costs you nothing. If you're not running any other C++ programs and link to the C++ library but don't use it then it'll just get paged to disk and not consume RAM. So basically, it's unlikely to cost you any memory even if you use it. There are plenty of good reasons for not using C++, but memory usage of the standard libraries isn't one of them. C++ is a big, nasty, bloated language but one of it's design decisions is that you don't pay for what you don't use. So you can pick the features that you want and ignore the others. This means, for example, that you could use classes and nothing else and you won't pay for templates, operator overloading, RTTI, etc. <rant> I do find ion's OO-system quite impenetrable -- everything seems hidden behind 10 layers of mutually recursive macros, and the class heirarchy isn't documented anywhere. While I'm sure it's clear in Tuomo's mind it does seem to discourage others from contributing code. Witness only one serious module (ion-dock) and all other patches being on a very small scale (no disrespect to the authors). I would much rather see Ion written either in C++ or C with the glib/gtk object system. This would make the code much more transparent to non-Tuomos and automatically provide for support for things like linked lists, UTF-8, antialiased fonts, module loading, etc. etc. </rant> <fantasy> My ideal Ion would: * be written in C/C++ * use gtk for as much as possible (modules, drawing, etc.) * use librsvg for drawing decorations (tabs) (mmm, eye candy) * use lua for configuration (mmm, scripting) </fantasy> <reality> ion-devel-20030131/ion-dock works brilliantly :-) </reality> Hope I haven't offended anyone :-) Tom
