Day: July 31, 2006

This week will be a documentation week for tinymail. A normal XP iteration means meet, design, implement, document and test. I very often do the document part (mostly the API). I, however, never brought all that documentation together. There’s of course still a lot other things to document. For example making some sample code embedded in the documentation.

The API reference is updated and moved to its final location (this doesn’t mean that this is the final 1.0 API. It might still change until I actually do a 1.0 release). I have setup a trac website for tinymail and one for camel-lite-builder. These trac websites will function as the developers website for tinymail.

I discussed some ideas with Ivan Krstic about E-mail and the One Laptop Per Child project. The current idea is to make a local webserver that will serve webpages like, I guess, Roundcube does. But then much smaller in memory footprint. Which is why he’s interested in tinymail and its Python bindings. I will of course make sure that the tinymail framework can function perfectly in a web environment.

Christopher Blizzard then asked me to fill in this page on the OLPCWiki. It contains some information about tinymail on the OLPC laptop.

I hope people will help me this week with setting up all the wiki pages of the tinymail trac. Everybody is of course invited to improve things like the website (just wget -r it) or documentation or the trac infrastructure and its wiki pages. If you have an idea: please go ahead and edit it. I mean .. if I don’t like it, I can remove it right?

I also hope there’s going to be more people helping me with language bindings. Like improving the Python ones and implementing the .NET ones. The more of this stuff that I will have before making a first release, the better this first release will be. If somebody climbs the stage, I will definitely join him on this. If nobody does, it might be delayed until after my holiday: Tinne decided that I need a break next week.

A few days ago, on some mailing list, I wrote:

I actually but truly believe that running most GNOME programs under a garbage collector would actually save (a lot) more memory then the virtual machine would add.

In stead of just saying such crazy things, I should of course also prove it. It’s of course not easy to prove this. What I can do is show you two programs that do exactly the same. One program uses Python language bindings. The other doesn’t use language bindings but directly invokes the API in C using GObject.

The two applications loaded the same IMAP folder of ~1000 headers. And unloaded that folder.

The usage of Python bindings causes some Python proxy objects to be created. I think (but I’m not sure) that most of the extra memory that you will see is caused by these.

• The Python application
• The C application

In Python

In C

Consider that most desktop applications consume more than 20MB and that the test application (tinymail) is designed and developed with low memory consumption in mind, I still believe the overhead introduced by a higher programming language isn’t significant for most desktop applications. Not even for mobile devices with not-so-much memory.

On Mono, the results would probably differ a little bit. But probably not a lot. I indeed hope people will join me on creating good .NET bindings for tinymail.