FYI: 4.7 panel and plugins

[Jannis Pohlmann]

On Tue, 26 May 2009 10:06:37 +0200
Nick Schermer <nickschermer at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2009/5/26 Brian J. Tarricone <bjt23 at cornell.edu>:
> > I really hope you'll reconsider this.  Calling g_thread_init()
> > requires that a program is linked to libgthread, which requires
> > that the program is linked to libpthread.  Libpthread replaces a
> > large number of libc functions with (slower) thread-safe versions,
> > which obviously isn't necessary in a non-threaded applications.
> >  This also slows app startup since the dynamic linker has to work
> > harder (not just to load extra libraries, but to override existing
> > symbols in the GST).
> 
> Ok will look into this and provide a preinit call, which will only
> work for plugins that run external.
> 
> > Having plugins not know if they're external or internal is somewhat
> > nice from an implementation perspective[1], but this is an
> > abstraction that really shouldn't be there.
> 
> Well too late, it's something the panel provides for some time now and
> not something i'm going to revert.
> 
> > On the other hand... is there a need for internal plugins at all?
> > Would there be much of a performance/resource usage impact if (for
> > example) the launcher plugin was made external?
> 
> Internal plugins are a lot faster. If a plugin is stable and does
> nothing that might lock the main thread for a long time (no http stuff
> for example), I prefer a plugin to be internal.

Performance is not really an issue with most plugins, is it? Anyway, I
thought plugins in the new panel are run in a wrapper process, so isn't
this discussion about internal and external plugins a little pointless?

  - Jannis
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