> In theory one could load only the plugins needed and in that way save startup > time and memory. However in OB, once you load one plugin all plugins are > loaded (one by one, making it slow).
Sounds like a great project. If you or anyone else wants to improve the plugin loading code to load on demand, please let me know. Open Babel is a purely volunteer project, so features are added / coded when people have a need and write the code. It's been ages since I benchmarked the plugin loading code (i.e., well over 10 years) but my conclusion back then was that: - it's a meaningful time delay for short tasks, but those are fast anyway - when you're repeating short tasks (e.g., using the obabel binary repeatedly in a shell script) most of the plugins get cached by modern OS - for long tasks, it's not the time-limiting step There were two reasons for them: - they're much easier to write than adding to a monolithic library. (Does anyone want 100 API calls for different formats, etc.?) - they can be offloaded as needed by the OS I'm sure someone could code up an index/cache to improve plugin loading. Please do. In the meantime, as you note, it's possible to compile static and/or hack the build as you wish. -Geoff _______________________________________________ OpenBabel-Devel mailing list OpenBabel-Devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openbabel-devel
