[sugar] Remarks on the Work of Sugar

[Martin Langhoff]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 5:56 PM, Michael Stone <michael at laptop.org> wrote:
> While I'm convinced that protocol buffers and their supporting code
> generators are cute, I'm also convinced that the real issue in the IPC
> space is not "what marshalling format do you use?" but is, instead,
> "what tools are available to generate, capture, dissect, and reply to
> IPC queries?". Unfortunately, I don't care much about generating
> marshalling code; hence, they don't seem superior to me in the areas
> that I care about. (see below)

Well, you made one point (ease-of-debugging of IPC) and I raised
another one - cpu+memory costs. protobuf seems to be a good
performance trick at the expense of clarity.

Likely to please me more than you :-)

> I suspect that we'd have to measure to find out [1]. In practice, my
> suspicion is that Sugar transfers relatively little data over D-Bus
> but does a lot of work in response to the data that is transferred.

If you are right, then there's no point for me to stress out about its
performance. All IPC mechanisms are best used with tiny messages.

cheers,



m
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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