Re: gEDA: Re: Patches for PCB automake/autoconf system

[Charles Lepple <clepple@gmail.com>]

On Thu, 21 Oct 2004 11:29:46 +0200, Gabriel Paubert <paubert@iram.es> wrote:
> Besides the run time bloat of Python in some cases. I'm fighting right
> now with somebody who wants me to rewrite something which works and
> occupies (after compilation) 8kbytes (code+data in the executable) with
> a Python script which just after loading the libaries (before adding a
> single line of code of my own) already takes up 6-7Mb, and he wants to
> use an XML parser on top of that (it's buzzword compliant for sure) which
> will take an additional unknown amount of RAM to run. BTW this has to run
> on a diskless machine with 16Mb of RAM...

*sigh*

 the phrases "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and "right tool for the
job" come to mind...

On the other hand,
 
> I just can't stand a single line of automatically
> generated code in my programs

You don't have to use glade-generated code.  Have you looked at
libglade? It interprets the glade XML file to create the widgets, and
you specify your callbacks in the XML file.

I know what you're thinking: "interpreted? in a performance-critical
application?" Think about what libglade is doing: it is essentially
one-time initialization of GUI-related structures. If you're
constantly creating and destroying windows, you're doing something
wrong.

In fact, it's not that hard to get used to glade if you've ever done
any Win32 coding with Visual Studio's resource editor. (I'm sure there
are more of you out there than are willing to admit in public...)

Congrats to Stuart for recognizing that an installer is a good fit for
an interpreted language and a rapid GUI development framework.

-- 
- Charles Lepple