> > On Tue, 2006-04-11 at 03:31, Anne Wilson wrote: > > > > > > > > And while we're thinking about code reuse, why does > 'dll hell' occur? > > > > > > ---- > > > save that one for a Windows list please. > > > > > It wasn't meant as a question, Craig. Dll hell occurs, > AIUI, precisely > > because there is shared code, badly written and badly controlled. > All, right, I resisted but will finally take the flame bait. Much of DLL hell comes from a flaw in the original DLL design which stems from a flaw in the original object oriented design. Most DLL's implement a OO Class. The constructor is just an initialization routine. The space for the data structure under the class is allocated by the caller, which is not in the DLL. (You can get around this by having the object always be a pointer and the constructor allocates the storage and initializes the pointer, but that is not how a lot of classes work.) If the space an object takes was 500 bytes at the time the program was linked and you later swap in a new dll that expects a 512 byte space, it will initialize the 12 bytes past what the caller allocated. Sometimes this will happen to work and sometimes not. On the bloatware issue, before we can decide if something is bloated, we have to decide what bloat is. Yes, old DOS would boot from a floppy disk. Try doing digital video editing (where you can see what you are editing) using this. To me bloat is when you load a bunch of software you do not use. If I only use k3b to burn CD's, the other CD recording tools I don't use are bloat. If I use one of those tools and never use k3b, then k3b is bloat. I suspect much of what is termed bloat comes from the politics of what goes into the distribution and what it included by default. Also the people who want the "Install everything" option should not complain about bloat. Some people claim Open Office is bloated. Others claim we should have the same feature set plus some as Microsoft Office to be a viable alternative. There are other more trimmed down word processors which use up less resources and do not have a bunch of seldom used features. But then you can't read the MS Word document someone sends you. So you end up loading both word processors and get bloat. My conclusion is that one person's bloat is another's critical application. Oh well, enought ranting, I better get back to work. Bob Styma
