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From: Justus Winter <4winter@informatik.uni-hamburg.de>
User-Agent: alot/0.21+
To: Daniel Schoepe <daniel@schoepe.org>,
	Philippe LeCavalier <support@plecavalier.com>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
References: <87r4xur3rv.fsf@plc.plecavalier.com>
	<87fweamenf.fsf@schoepe.localhost>
In-Reply-To: <87fweamenf.fsf@schoepe.localhost>
Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:15:09 -0000
Message-ID: <20120221091509.8534.59492@thinkbox.jade-hamburg.de>
Subject: Re: nomuch_addresses.py
Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:15:09 +0100
Precedence: list

Quoting Daniel Schoepe (2012-02-17 02:28:52) [emphasis mine]:
>Just for completeness: I'm using the nice nottoomuch-addresses.pl script
>[1] by Tomi Ollila *which doesn't require any bindings* and is incredibly
>fast (after generating an initial address database).

I don't get it. The perl script isn't using any library bindings,
mainly because there are no libnotmuch bindings for perl. *But* it
does call the notmuch binary which is worse:

* incredibly high overhead (fork&exec) compared to a simple function
  call (plus maybe some kind of ffi)
* manual and error prone serialization of ''function arguments''
* manual and error prone deserialization of ''return values''
* very limited error reporting and handling capabilities
* any kind of resource (think handle to a xapian database) is lost if
  the process exists resulting in further overhead if the binary is
  called multiple times

I do get the feeling that it is perceived as desirable not to require
any kind of notmuch bindings (David once said something similar about
nmbug).

If that's the case I'd love to hear why and if there's anything we can
do about it.

Justus