On Fri, Aug 25, 2000 at 09:20:53AM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> At 09:12 AM 8/25/00 -0400, Stephen P. Potter wrote:
> > As you say, 200 lines isn't much. But combine that with the IPC, the
> >environment, the system, etc it all adds up.
>
> Not to much, though. We've been down this road for perl 5. You'd be
> surprised at how little code gets removed if you yank most of the functions
> under discussion. (They're generally trivial wrappers around library calls,
> with very little code involved)
Here are some numbers for people who have forgotten the above.
Using the latest perl development sources, using an unnamed UNIX:
bytes
microperl, which has almost nothing os dependent (*) in it 1212416
shared libperl 1277952 bytes + perl 32768 bytes 1310720
dynamically linked perl 1376256
statically linked perl with all the core extensions 2129920
(*) I haven't tried building it in non-UNIX boxes, so I can't be certain
of how fastidiously features have been disabled.
So ripping all this 'cruft' would save us about 100-160 kB, still
leaving us with well over a 1MB-plus executable. It's Perl itself
that's big, not the thin glue to the system functions.
--
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
# There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
# It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen
