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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Working on an improved Bf
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
I've been looking at the startup time issue for BottomFeeder for awhile now - I had been assuming that it was related to loading the feeds into memory. Well, that wasn't really it. Many releases ago, I had moved to a system of loading the application (the parcels in the 'app' directory) at startup. It turns out that the slow startup was almost entirely an artifact of loading those parcels.
That left me something of a quandary - being able to replace those parcels on the fly is a very convenient way of shipping patches and updates. Well, it turns out that I can do both. VisualWorks Smalltalk (which is what Bf is written in) supports reloading parcels. So I can ship a pre-built image with all the parcels loaded, and still check for new ones at startup. That's what this new runtime will support. In my testing, with 166 feeds to load, startup is near instant. As I ship patches out that will slow down some, but I can't really have everything, now can I?
If you decide to try it out, just grab one of the new installs from the dev portion of the downloads page. Also, delete all the files in the 'app' directory and in the 'plugins' directory - but leave the directories there.
Bear in mind that this change is only taking place for the dev version of the 7.2 build of BottomFeeder...
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