KDE 3 comes out soon. What is the best new
advancement/feature found in KDE 3 in your opinion?
David Faure: I think the most important improvement in KDE3 is
the greatly improved Javascript and DHTML support in Konqueror. I'm
not only saying this because I took part in the work on Javascript,
but also because this was said to be the most important drawback of
Konqueror in KDE 2 by many users. The IMAP support in KMail comes
to mind too, as an important new feature, for those using IMAP. KDE
3 is not a big architectural change (such as KDE 2.0 was), it is
simply a continuation in the work on all applications, adding the
features that the user requested, as well as improving speed and
stability.
Are the KDE people going to do something for the C++
loader problem in Linux, which results on slow KDE loading times?
Is the object prelinked method 'safe', or work is being done to the
loader itself, to add the needed functionality?
David Faure: You said it all ;) The linker has indeed been
identified as a cause for slowdown when starting C++ applications.
Work is being done in that area, though not by the KDE developers
themselves. The objprelink method does not appear to be stable
enough to work around this problem, it is known to be the reason
for crashes in the Javascript engine and in KMail. I'm not aware of
the details, but it seems objprelink is rather a "hack", i.e. a
quick change that doesn't address the whole issue. On the other
hand, rumours have it that the gcc/ld developers are working on
prelinking, which is something different, cleaner, faster, and
stable."
