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Waldo Bastian: Making C++ Ready for the Desktop

A reader writes:

Since it has been fashion to complain about KDE/GNOME faults on
LinuxToday lately, I thought it would be worthwhile pointing out
that these desktop environments are not the ones that are solely at
fault. The fault could just be GNU/Linux. Waldo Bastian has put up
a nice little paper concerning the speed issue in KDE, especially
the speed of application start up and how the GNU linker is a main
bottleneck.

“In this paper I would like to bring the attention to
an important performance bottleneck in the ld.so linker on
GNU/Linux systems wrt C++ programs. I will try to offer some
suggestions for improvement and hope that this paper will lead to a
discussion in the GNU/Linux community that eventually will lead to
a solution that addresses this problem.

It should also be noted that ld.so currently does a fine job for
the things it was designed. The problem is that it wasn’t designed
for todays Linux Desktop.

Starting a KDE application from the command line is slow. Slow
is a very subjective term, but when it comes to a graphical user
interface, things are typically perceived as slow when there is a
latency of more than 0.3 secs. between action and reaction. So if I
click on a button, it should bring up a window on my screen within
0.3 secs. If it takes longer, users tend to perceive the system as
slow.

KDE is slow. Since I am very concerned about KDE I have been
looking into the reason why KDE is slow. Obviously there are a
number of factors that contribute to the problem. What we are
interested in is the startup-performance which I would like to
define as the time it takes between the moment the binary image is
being executed and the moment the first visual feedback appears on
the screen.”

Complete
Story

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