Re: Plugin RFC

Thanks for getting this started Dom.
Here are a few data points, all TRUNK, stripped, cross-built on linux
with gcc 3.4.5 and weighed using ls -lh.

Plain executable:
5.0M abiword.exe

Including a set of statically linked plugins, namely
babelfish kword s5 t602 xslfo loadbindings applix sdw iscii
freetranslation clarisworks hancom urldict nroff mif eml latex hrtext
docbook mswrite passepartout openwriter wml pdb wikipedia opml pdf
paint presentation google:
5.6M abiword.exe

A typical one-file plugin:
53K bmp.dll

- Rob

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 5:58 PM, Dominic Lachowicz
<domlachowicz@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Abi's build system has had a few major improvements in the 2.7 era,
> thanks largely to Rob and FJF.
>
> 1) The plugins live under the same "roof" as the rest of Abi
> 2) We can now have "default" plugins that always get built, like OpenDocument
> 3) The plugins can be statically linked into Abi. Startup time is
> apparently the same as if no plugins were loaded at all.
>
> Given this, I'm wondering if it might make sense *for our default
> installers* to:
>
> 1) Ship a set of useful, fairly polished plugins
> and
> 2) Statically link that set in. Other plugins could still be shipped
> in an "abiword plugins" package, and modularly loaded at runtime
>
> We would need to define that set (or at least criteria for what counts
> as "useful" and "polished"). Something like ODF would probably count.
> Something like AbiGimp
> probably doesn't count.
>
> A down-side of this is that the executable's size would be larger -
> (roughly) sizeof(abiword.exe) + sum(sizeof(each_plugin)). However,
> we're talking
>
> Startup of Abi 2.6 on Windows is significantly slower than it used to
> be. Wildly guessing, I think that this is due to some of our new
> external dependencies and also to plugin loading.
>
> Another benefit of this *may* be that we won't run into those "plugin
> conflict" problems on Windows, where we can't load both plugin A and
> plugin B at the same time. Again, this is speculation.
>
> Thoughts?
> Dom
>
Received on Thu Apr 10 18:32:56 2008