On Aug 30, 2007, at 10:46 , Andreas Raab wrote:
tim Rowledge wrote:
On 30-Aug-07, at 8:55 AM, Andreas Raab wrote:
You mean loading the image and relocating pointers is no excuse? Running the startup code, redrawing the screen? No excuses either?
It's a *reason* but not an *excuse*. Yes, there is a load of assorted stuff done as the VM starts up and loads the image (which could take several seconds on some machine/setups) and then as the image starts up. That's the reason(s). The excuse really adds up to "we haven't bothered to improve things". As John mentioned, it seems likely that some of the VM related memory scanning could be improved. Looking at the fairly intimidating list of things done as part of the image startup I feel sure we could do a lot better
- not least by having a smaller simpler better thought out image
in the first place.
Fix it ;-) In the meantime there is at least *some* feedback that the application has successfully launched. I find it highly disturbing (to say the least) if you don't get any feedback for several seconds when an application launches. The splash screen may not be an optimal solution but it sure as hell beats seeing absolutely nothing.
There is this idea I discussed on and off with people ... which is having part of the object memory be "static/read-only". Objects in there wouldn't be garbage-collected (ven by a full GC), and writing to them would copy them into regular space. Unfortunately this wouldn't help with start-up time unless we also move to an object table (so oops wouldn't have to be rewritten on start-up).
- Bert -