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Difference b/w PC .dll install files and Mac's ___?
- Thread starter rocknpop
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Nearly all applications store all assets inside their own application "files". Macs do not have a DLL equivalent, and don't normally experience such slowdowns.
One of the biggest reasons Windows runs slower over time is due to the registry. Mac's do NOT employ a similar database of settings.
So how do they work? Do they install these registry files somewhere else?
Sorry for my noob questions, I just became a Mac guy
So how do they work? Do they install these registry files somewhere else?
Sorry for my noob questions, I just became a Mac guy
Most applications will store user preferences in files in the user folder called *drumroll* preference files. These can be simple text files that are simply hidden by prefixing with a dot (.) or as more complex xml files with the users ~/Library/Application Support/Application folder to System preferences stored in the system Library folder.
So, if you add an application, lets says TextMate (an awesome application I must say: http://macromates.com/), the TextMate application is usually copied to the /Applications folder. Once you choose your preferred colors, fonts, etc, those settings are stored in a file within your home folder (your user folder) In the case of TextMate, it's a .plist file, which is effectively just a rich text file containing your preferred settings for the application. That settings file will only take up a small amount of disk space and be read only when you run TextMate.
Now, on the Windows side what typically happens is you run an installer for an application, it will copy the application itself to the %systemroot%/Program Files directory, then a bunch of supporting files to the same folder, or to the Windows system folder (those are .dll's typically) and then the program will write a bunch of settings into a common database called the registry. That registry is read on bootup, everytime, all of it and some portions are loaded into memory. If you simply delete an application from disk, those registry settings remain. So imagine installing 30 applications, which write 30 x whatever number of settings per application are required into the registry. That begins to really add up and unfortunately, the registry doesn't scale well. The bigger it is, the worse it performs.
I've oversimplified the description a lot, but without going into ridiculous detail, the above describes the main differences between the two.
Does that mean that when you uninstall an app you delete everything related to that app and there are no useless files left behind?
No, there are useless files left behind, they just don't bugger anything up like they would on Windows. Most plists are at most a few kilobytes in size.