Re: Shrinking GTK for PDA usage

[Michael Taht <mtaht mvista com>]

> Also, what's the point of running directfb + xdirectf vs running X11?
> Is it worth it?

DirectFB is quite a bit smaller than X itself, a few hundred K, at most.
GTK2, which is required for DirectFB, is at least 1MB bigger than gtk
1.2.10 (and requires a ton more supporting libraries as well)

Giving up the infrastructure of standard X + gtk 1.2 to use DirectFB +
gtk2 + (pango, atk, etc) strikes me as a losing proposition, at least
today. There are very few applications available for gtk2. Gtk2 has been
underperforming gtk 1.2 by as much as 5x, and DirectFB would only
complicate portability/reliability matters further. 

At least on my ipaq, the OS accounts for about 22MB, and the graphics
stack (TinyX + GTK) comes to < 4MB. The fonts range from about 3MB (snf
+ truetype) to over 14MB (japanese). Applications that build on top of
the TinyX graphics stack range from  26k (the blurt xterm emulator) to
26MB+ (mozilla+skipstone).

It strikes me as attacking the wrong problem to trim down the core
graphics stack at the expense of functionality or compatibility, when
you have larger fish to optimize.

Also, since most handhelds today have 32MB of compressible flash (the
above base configuration compresses down nicely to about 14MB - and yes
I have a full blown mozilla running on my ipaq in less than 32MB of
overall flash). Moore's law still functions - capacities will double
again in 18 months - so, today, you'd be better off focusing on
shrinking off the shelf applications (gaim, abiword, skipstone, etc) to
fit the screen size rather than on reducing the size of the libraries
themselves. 

My .02


-- 
______________
Michael Taht			BLOG: http://the-edge.blogspot.com
Member, Visionary Staff 	MontaVista Software

"The difficulty in managing [technology] displacement threats is often 
attributed to an unwillingness to cannibalize existing technology 
investments; organizational inertia; and the inability to adopt
necessary 
skills needed to engage in the new technology." - Ron Adner