[compiz] Protocol Buffers in Compiz and libcompizconfig

[Erkin Bahceci]

Hi,

We're planning to use Protocol Buffers (Google's data interchange
format: http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/ ) in a future
version of Compiz and libcompizconfig to speed up metadata parsing,
which currently makes up more than 75% of the start-up time for Compiz
according to Valgrind. Preliminary work in this direction has shown
promising results.

We'll be adding libprotobuf as an optional dependency to those future
versions of Compiz and libcompizconfig, such that it will be possible
to enable or disable the use of protocol buffers at compile time. This
change is not for the current distro release round (Ubuntu 8.10,
OpenSUSE 11.1, Fedora 10, etc.). From the next round on, libprotobuf
will need to be packaged for better Compiz (and ccsm/simple-ccsm)
start-up performance. However, it would be nice if distros would
package libprotobuf starting from the current round if they are not
already doing so. This would help users who want to use Compiz and
Compiz Fusion from git in a few months compile them with protocol
buffers support to get the best performance.

Regards,
Erkin