OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Internet

Mypal68: A possible alternative browser?

<< < (3/3)

Dave Yeo:
Other challenges.
Browsers have gone multi-process where each tab or at least each domain runs in its own process. They communicate with local sockets and our local sockets, meant for things like syslog, isn't up to it. If you run Dooble, you might notice it is in single process mode, which is only there for debugging purposes and is unsupported. If you put Dooble into multi-process mode, it becomes unstable. Multi-process also uses more memory, not too bad as most of the code is shared in DLL's.
Compiling. Firefox moved to Rust, memory intensive and a really crappy language for compatibility with itself. For example, something compiles with version 1.0.16 won't compile with 1.0.17. numbers might be off but minor version changes break stuff. Probably unusable on a 32 bit platform.
Modern C++ also can be pretty memory intensive, I've seen 2GB of memory used to compile one file. Makes it hard to run multiple jobs without running out of memory. Memory also gets fragmented where sometimes only a reboot will fix the fragmentation.
Linking the large DLL's, same problem with memory. Often need the whole address range (VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT=3072) to link.
Actually it is pretty amazing how well OS/2 does in the memory department considering it was optimized to run on 4MB (really needed 8MB to use the WPS) and was developed in a time when 16MB of ram was a lot.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page

Go to full version