Re: Shrinking GTK for PDA usage

[Sven Neumann <sven gimp org>]

Hi,

Michael Taht <mtaht mvista com> writes:

> DirectFB is quite a bit smaller than X itself, a few hundred K, at most.

how large is your X11 setup? From our experience the difference is about
one Megabyte.

> 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)

and it offers a lot more functionality and much improved i18n support.

> 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. 

IMO you are mistaken. No new application will be developed using
GTK+-1.2 and almost all existing applications will very soon be
available as GTK+-2.0 applications and will continue to be developed
on this platform. If you are building up a software environment now,
you should try to use bleeding edge technology, otherwise everything
you've just build up will be out-of-date as soon as it is finished.

We started to use GTK+-2.0 over a year ago since we knew that we will
need its features and that it will be the stable GTK+ platform when
our software reaches the stable state. I can not imagine how one can
nowadays even consider to use GTK+-1.2 for anything new.

> 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. 

We have written DirectFB with settop-boxes in mind where the typical
flash size is about 2MB.


Salut, Sven