[Kst] Dummy objects and KstBasicPlugin

[Barth Netterfield]

On Tuesday 10 October 2006 10:47, Adam Treat wrote:
> > -Do all of the dialogs get built when kst starts, or do the get built
> > when needed (relevent for startup performance if you have hundreds of
> > plugins).
>
> Yes, with a shadow dummy object they are instantiated on startup... all of
> them.  
>
> However, I fail to see how this is any more of a performance hit than
> constructing a PluginInfo object like the datasources already do.  Either
> way you are loading the library of the plugin, calling methods, and
> instantiating a PluginInfo object for every plugin on startup.

It probably isn't - but it is more likely that we will have lots and lots of 
plugins that it is that we will have lots and lots of data sources.  But, not 
having benchmarked anything, I am only speculating.  I guess we could 
benchmark startup time (?).  How invasive would it be to implement 
when-needed dialog building if, once everthingis ported, we decide that there 
is a performance hit.

> I think if we tell the plugin authors to use an init() function triggered
> from the algorithm method rather than putting resource intensive bits in
> the ctor we'll be just fine and the API will be much nicer.

Sounds perfect.