jg@jumbo.UUCP (02/26/87)
Some people are (justifiably) concerned about executable sizes when using toolkits on X, in particular for V11, after the painful experience of binary sizes on some other window systems we can name (but won't). Such sizes often determine application startup time, not to mention the disk space used. So, let me give you some more concrete numbers.... Under development is a front end for mh (xmh), which is an excellent exercise of X and toolkits. It provides a mouse oriented interface something like mhe, but with scroll bars, button panels, forms, emacs style editor, and so on, using a second approximation of the V11 toolkit a'la the joint DEC/HP request for comments. It uses essentially all of the toolkit functions, for example, button colors can be set on a per button basis. It is being used as one of the major test applications. For good performance, it is doing caching of folder entries, etc, and provides a good interface to essentially all of MH's abilities; some of it in duplication to MH, and some by using some of MH's commands as children with pipes. It provides an interface to essentially all of MH's functions. (End of rave; it is actually much nicer than I have space to describe here; I would no longer be able to survive my mail without it.). It serves as a good example of a very complex and ambitious toolkit program, doing non-trivial amounts of non-toolkit work on behalf of the user. Its current size on the VAX today, without optimization (still being worked on), is: text data bss 147456 27648 8028 The size of the stripped binary is 176128 (I only had a -g binary lying around). I have no good feeling as to how much of the code is toolkit, how much is Xlib, and how much is the application, but it is pretty clear that the executables are very much smaller than many other systems. If window management had to be built into each program, it would not surprise me to see executable sizes climb dramatically. We now have V11 running to where the "not a window manager" window manager can provide titlebars, resize and top boxes, (decoration), completely external to applications. It can be started and stopped on the fly, and everything happens correctly, with the window decorations and associated management appearing and disappearing as the window manager is started and stopped. In V11 there will be no excuse to build any window management function into an application. And no, you can't get a copy of xmh right now.... Don't even THINK of asking..... I am not willing to even tell you the author's name. Jim Gettys