RFC: startup time - again

[Dennis Benzinger]

Hi!

Am 10.09.2008 13:26, Adrian Wilkins schrieb:
> [...]
> For me, the real performance of Bazaar is not in whether it reports on a
> `bzr st` before I've lifted my finger from the enter key. It's in all
> the work it does for me. It's in the merging support. It's in the fact
> that it's written in a language that I could pick up and hack on without
> being terrified of what I'd do to it. (My C experience is limited).

+1

I also chose Bazaar because of it's features not it's little startup
time. To me the time spent for "real" operations is much more important.
I wouldn't even care if it took one or two seconds to start up.
Comparing the startup time of Bazaar to something like a slowed down ls
or cd is missing the point, IMHO. You execute cd or ls much more often
than Bazaar and most of the time Bazaar really has to do more work than
cd and ls. And if programs do real work users are willing to wait for
them. Sure, if I'd just type bzr rocks a hundred times then I'd start
caring about startup time. But that's not what I want from Bazaar. I
want an easy to use, feature-rich, adaptable DVCS thats reasonably fast
if it's doing real work.

>> C
> 
> Please don't consider going to C for performance reasons.
> [...]

+1

If you really want to do that please keep Bazaar usable only with Python
and do not require C to run Bazaar if I don't really need the speed
improvements. Python code is so much easier to hack on and to extend
than C. And on a lot of machines there is no C compiler preinstalled nor
is it possible to install one (e.g. corporate environments). Sometimes
this problem could be avoided by providing precompiled binaries. But if
you start using C then probably some plugins also would need C and you
would have to provide binaries for them too. That would open a can of
worms of problems. For example on Windows it's difficult to combine
precompiled libraries with Python if they don't use the same C compiler.
That's already a problem for Python and some libraries.


Thanks for writing Bazaar!

Just my two cents,
Dennis Benzinger