Re: lynx-dev lynx: questions and suggestions

[dickey]

> *Lynx thoroughly registers functions  (via atexit) that will free up 
> allocated 
>  memory chunks. IMO it's not necessary at least on "normal" systems - 
> allocated 

that's only used for memory-leak checking, should be ifdef'd as such.

>  memory is always reclaimed at the program exit. Not registering functions 
> that  
>  clear allocated space possibly will yield performance increase since 
>  (as I understand) it let libc routines to clear the memory in the way it  
>  thinks optimal (in the order the chunks are in the memory manager lists).  
>      IMO it's safe to make such optimization for all Unixes and possibly  
>  Windows. Am I right ? Please correct this list of OSes if something wrong. 
>   
> * Lynx memset's to 0 'links' and 'history' in 'main' (their total size is 
> ~85Kb). 
>  IMO it's useless since unitiliazied data is always fill by zeros. May be 
> this 

not true (I've gotten a few reports about this for non-Unix systems)

>  operation should be done exclusively on those OSes, under which it's not  
>  correct. This will slightly speedup invokation time at least on slow 
> machines.  
>      IMO it's safe to make such optimization for all Unixes and possibly  
>  Windows. Am I right ? Please correct this list of OSes if something wrong. 
>   
>   Keyboard layout: 
> * It seems that there are only very few keys that are unassigned. May be it's 
>   time to switch to handling of key sequences (may be limiting their length 
> by 
>   two keys for now, like ^x-s) 
>    
>      LSS support: 
> * May be it's time to declare lss support non-experimental and, may be, make  
>   it be compiled-in by default? IMO it doesn't have apparent bugs in  
>   implementation. 
> * May be it will be useful to include more examples of .lss files with  
>   distribution so that non-experienced users be able to select one of them  
>   instead of composing their own? (I can post mine and the one that was sent  
>   by Sergey Svishchev <address@hidden>). 

I added those to the samples directory for dev.21

>   -Vlad 


-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
address@hidden
http://www.clark.net/pub/dickey