[kde-linux] Kget "My Downloads" [Is this MS Windows?]

[Kevin Krammer]

On Monday, 2013-04-22, Duncan wrote:

> One of the big problems and my personally biggest frustration with
> plasma, certainly so when one misbehaving plasmoid would freeze or take
> down the entire thing, is that it was single threaded (at least where it
> counted), and a single process with no protection between components...
> in a plugin architecture marketed from the beginning as extensible by
> third parties with who knows what sort of experience or lack of it, etc.
> 
> That just made NO sense to me!

It is a result of the goals and inherent limitations of the available 
technologies.
The goal was to have user interface bits that can be deployed to multiple 
locations types, e.g. on panels, desktop, overlay, etc. and allow great 
flexibility in form and shape.
No available technology at that point allowed multiple processes to 
concurrently draw to the same surface or sufficiently handle user even de-
multiplexing.

So the choice was to do all user interfacing bits in the same process but 
allowing all data processing to happen asynchronously, thus enabling usage of 
multi processing or multi threading for that part.

> But apparently, at least part of it was due to compromises forced by the
> qt4 context they were working with.  The technical details went fuzzy on
> me, but apparently, there was simply no provision in qt4 for multi-
> threading or protecting critical contexts which would need access from
> multiple components at the same time.

No, Qt4 can handle multi threading just fine. This worked already in Qt3 (I 
have been working on massively multithreaded Qt3 projects over many years of 
my career) and Qt4 improved on that a lot.

> But if Kevin's correct and they're targetting a tech preview release for
> this summer, we don't have long to wait now, to get at least a small
> hint.  If the preview has a plasma that still uses that single file for
> all its components, I'm not going to be happy about the outlook.

It is very unlikely that there will be a Plasma implementation based on 
frameworks 5 in time of the frameworks 5 tech preview.
Maybe in some development branch but almost certainly not as something that 
can do a tech preview itself.

Cheers,
Kevin
-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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