Subject: RE: libole2
From: Dom Lachowicz (dominicl@seas.upenn.edu)
Date: Tue Jun 06 2000 - 16:08:49 CDT
Eric,
AFAIK, wv's old OLE2 engine(a loala derivate i think..) wasn't being maintained
any longer and couldn't write OLE streams, which would hamper the word export
project enormously. libole2 recieves a lot of maintaining from the gnumeric
people, who use it to import and export excel spreadsheets flawlessly.
i don't believe that this code would cause a "huge" slowdown in the importer.
again, i look at how fast gnumeric saves and loads excel spreadsheets. if there
is a slowdown, it's probably some small code glitch on our end. i believe the
old discussion was about how it can use mmap() on platforms that supported
the call. in a lot of cases, using mmap can speed up the reading of a stream,
but that's not always the case. the old code didn't use mmap and did fine,
for example. i'm assuming the non-mmaped libole2 case is similar preformance-
wise to the old code.
no doubt there will be some issues as the integration continues and bug-fixing
occurs. hopefully, all of the problems will be small like a couple of typedefs
and #defines. libole2 is a work in progress, but (i think) it was well designed
and we should be able to fix the few problems compiling it exhibits. its code
is utterly generic insofar as what libraries and calls it depends upon. your
system needs to be able to do is (basically) read and write binary data,
similar to the POSIX read() and write() commands.
hopefully, as a result of this, Abiword will have a better Word importer in
terms of correctness and in speed. also, the switch facilitates the building
of a Word exporter, which is a must-have. i think that this progress is worth
a little downtime on some tinderbox builds, but hampering developers and
breaking platforms on a XP project is never good :-)
Dom
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