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How Snow Leopard Cut ObjC Launch Time In Half
MBCook writes "Greg Parker has an excellent technical article on his blog about the changes to the dynamic linker (dyld) for Objective-C that Snow Leopard uses to cut launch time in half and cut about 1/2 MB of memory per application. 'In theory, a shared library could be different every time your program is run. In practice, you get the same version of the shared libraries almost every time you run, and so does every other process on the system. The system takes advantage of this by building the dyld shared cache. The shared cache contains a copy of many system libraries, with most of dyld's linking and loading work done in advance. Every process can then share that shared cache, saving memory and launch time.' He also has a post on the new thread-local garbage collection that Snow Leopard uses for Objective-C."
Christ, the OSX fanbois are out in force today. This is the first time I've ever gotten a troll rating, basically for stating that it's similar to something that Linux has. It wasn't meant as a disparagement. I regularly use OSX and applaud any performance improvements. But I guess we can't even mention when similar features exist on other platforms. Note that I said SIMILAR; I recognize that it isn't exactly the same as prelink in Linux.
And this latter part is exactly what I referred to above when I compared it to prelink in Linux. And I was subsequently marked a troll for stating this similarity.
a sad world. at
Too bad I had to restore my computer to Leopard.....because with all this whiz-bang technology, many of my applications started to crash when saving files. I lost a days time updating and then restoring my two macs.
Apple II had this in 1979. Back then we called it a "jump table". :)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.