Skip wrote:
My standalone file sizes have almost doubled / tripled since version 7. Is
this all due to Unicode additions? I have a file that always used to be
3mb and now is climbing to 9mb with no additions to the coding.
Just seems like quite a jump in size.
v6.7.5 had a Windows runtime engine weighing in at 3.5 MB, and in v7
that's now 8.9 MB.
A jump indeed, and I'm told much of it is related to Unicode libraries,
for which I've heard mixed prognoses about the likelihood of having
conditional inclusion at some point in the future.
In the here-and-now, even at the current size it's a fraction of what
ToolBook and many similar tools require, and unlike most of them the
LiveCode engine is self-contained, only requiring DLLs for specialized
things like databases. I believe Xojo's core library is a bit smaller
than LiveCode's, but not by as much as one might expect for a tool
requiring lower-level compilation. Last I looked the Python engine was
at least twice as large as LiveCode's.
I don't spend enough time on Windows to have a feel for how LC's engine
size compares with other app sizes, and Linux apps generally favor heavy
dependency on shared libraries so app sizes can be smaller but with
compatibility risks LiveCode is usually immune to.
On OS X, reviewing app sizes in general helps us appreciate that the new
engine isn't all that large compared to other OS X apps, it's just that
the older engines were very very small by such comparison.
It's always been the case that xTalk app sizes start out large relative
to functionality. That is, if you make a window with a single button
that displays "Hello World" in Microsoft Visual C++ and do the same
thing in LiveCode, there will be a big difference.
But with LiveCode this is a one-time hit. As you add features to your
app the engine stays the same size. You can multiply features in your
LiveCode app with only incremental increase in file size, but executable
file size will multiply with other development systems, often ultimately
surpassing what's needed to deliver that feature set in LiveCode.
A comparison with other specific app sizes and more details can be found
in this post from February:
<http://www.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode//2015-February/211853.html>
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Systems
Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
____________________________________________________________________
ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com
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