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Originally Posted by Ricowan
The ACE2 libraries do benefit the person that uses a lot of addons, who is able to select those addons that share libraries efficiently.
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In most cases this is true, but not always. It depends what the library does, and how it does it. A library like Dewdrop or Tablet shared between 20 addons is almost certainly an improvement over the same 20 addons each implementing their own dropdown menus and pseudo-tooltips. However, if you have 20 addons using AceLocale for simple translations, you're actually wasting the 17KB AceLocale library, and you'd be better off implementing your own localization in each addon. Same goes for AceEvent -- if your 20 addons are each simply watching for a few events, and you're not using the scheduling features, there's no reason to give the user the 33KB library when an additional 2-3 short lines of code in your addon will accomplish the same thing.
There are also many cases where the authors of different addons have each developed a library that accomplishes essentially the same thing. An example of this would be Aloft and PitBull -- the author of Aloft created the TagCompiler library, while the author of PitBull created the DogTag library.
So, my earlier point stands -- libraries shouldn't be a consideration for users at all. They should only be a consideration for addon authors, who should carefully consider their use before actually using them. Many libraries are widely useful and can improve performance through code sharing, but many others are over-specialized with features that probably won't be used by other addons because they can really only do one thing, or over-generalized with so many features that you'd have to run 500 addons to come close to using all of it.
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