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ActiveTcl 8.5 size ?
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| Anyone know what feature(s) in particular has caused the growth in size
of ActiveTcl between 8.4 and 8.5a2?
On my WindowsXP machine:
tcl84.dll 580KB
tk84.dll 788KB
tcl85.dll 924KB (+59%)
tcl85.dll 1068KB (+35%)
Or maybe those 8.5 libraries are debugging builds, that will be much
smaller when 8.5 final is released?
For folks that prefer to distribute their applications as "wrapped"
applications (e.g. Starpacks or Freewrap), size does matter. I always
assumed that is why many extensions have remained as Tcl/Tk packages
that can be loaded if needed without bloating the core?
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| Jeff Hobbs 2005-07-25, 5:35 pm |
| Bugs wrote:
> Anyone know what feature(s) in particular has caused the growth in size
> of ActiveTcl between 8.4 and 8.5a2?
>
> On my WindowsXP machine:
>
> tcl84.dll 580KB
> tk84.dll 788KB
>
> tcl85.dll 924KB (+59%)
> tcl85.dll 1068KB (+35%)
>
> Or maybe those 8.5 libraries are debugging builds, that will be much
> smaller when 8.5 final is released?
Those are just not accurate for direct comparison. Likely
different compile options were used, but 8.5 does have more
features.
--
Jeff Hobbs, The Tcl Guy
http://www.ActiveState.com/, a division of Sophos
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| Jeff Hobbs wrote:
>
> Those are just not accurate for direct comparison. Likely
> different compile options were used, but 8.5 does have more
> features.
>
Hi Jeff. Yeah, I expected them to be larger for 8.5 with the additional
functionality but not THAT much larger, that's why I was asking. Do you
expect when 8.5 final is released it will be smaller that the current
alphas are?
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| Aric Bills 2005-07-25, 10:10 pm |
| > For folks that prefer to distribute their applications as "wrapped"
> applications (e.g. Starpacks or Freewrap), size does matter.
It's probably more accurate to say that "size may be a consideration"
for wrapped apps. But in practical terms, it's probably not a
significant consideration for most people. Consider the sizes of the
Windows UPX Tclkits for 8.4.9 (932 kb) and 8.5a2 (1010 kb)--a difference
of 78 kb. If you're distributing your software on a floppy disk, 78 kb
might make a difference, but over the Internet and certainly on a CD, 78
kb is negligible. In instances where it does matter, you still have the
option of writing your apps for the earlier, smaller version of Tcl.
> I always
> assumed that is why many extensions have remained as Tcl/Tk packages
> that can be loaded if needed without bloating the core?
Well, some other practical factors also come into play :) Like the fact
that it's much easier to throw together and distribute an extension than
it is to write style-guide-compliant code that has to work properly on a
number of different platforms, and go through the TIP process. Or
licensing issues, such as when a package wraps a GPL'ed C library and
therefore can't go into the core. Or the fact that some extensions are
too specific to a limited domain to justify their presence in the core.
I imagine that the core could get quite a bit bigger if the need arose
and especially if the community would contribute the code.
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