On Fri, 27 Oct 2000, the fast fingers of Mark Hatch wrote:
MH> The only GUI toolkit with a significantly lighter footprint was
MH> fltk.
FLTK was intended to be "light". It achieves that goal by trading size by
functionality: no resource manager support, only one display, simple
geometry management, limited I18N, etc. It also doesn'n use some C/C++
features (macros, templates, multiple inheritance, or exceptions,
according to the "about" page).
Looking the numbers in your message I guess the "Hello, world" programs
were linked statically. This masquerades the fact that there is much more
functionality in Xt than in FLTK. And FLTK is C++, leading to larger
executable code. Look at this:
# ls -l hello-fltk /usr/X11R6/bin/xconsole
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 11544 25 Jul 03:23 /usr/X11R6/bin/xconsole
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 25488 30 Out 11:42 hello-fltk
# size /usr/X11R6/bin/xconsole hello-fltk
text data bss dec hex filename
8824 1076 4456 14356 3814 /usr/X11R6/bin/xconsole
21937 912 484 23333 5b25 hello-fltk
(Yes, I know xconsole is not Motif application :-)
MH> We've looked at the Motif source code, and it is a basic
MH> architectural decision that would require a full rewrite to
MH> reverse. I haven't looked at the lesstif source, but maybe the
MH> lesstif team made a different design decision?
Rewriting Motif may not be enough. Compare the size of the Motif and Xaw
versions of "Hello, world" and you will see similar sizes. Both Xaw and
Motif depend on the Xt architecture. Rewriting Xt could lead to a smaller
footprint, but would break the standards.
--
Carlos A. M. dos Santos
Federal University of Pelotas Meteorological Research Center
Av. Ildefonso Simoes Lopes 2791 Pelotas, RS, Brasil, CEP 96060-290
WWW: http://www.cpmet.ufpel.tche.br RENPAC (X.25): 153231641
Phone: +55 53 277-6767 FAX: +55 53 277-6722
