Free The (Crispy) Bits!
Recently I've been joining the memory reduction mission in a hard-core stylee, by poking at the lower libraries in the GNOME stack.
A few partial patches to Pango were submitted which chipped away at the non-constant data bit by bit, before Owen decided to knock the wall down and do a comprehensive review, saving 12K per process.
Fontconfig is an interesting program to work on, and during the hacking it is quite easy to end up with a Fontconfig which doesn't think there are any fonts, or more amusingly gives you Isabella or Mistral when asked for Vera. However, I did eventually fix these bugs and now Fontconfig patterns (the core data type) use less memory and are a lot faster. Excellent stuff, but Fontconfig is still allocating a lot of memory when there are many fonts (fc-list | wc -l says 435 faces on my desktop), which Pango then copies for some reason (probably a sensible one but what do I know).
Of course, working on this more will have to wait until I get back from India...
