Hi, On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 1:32 AM, dos386 <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I personally don't care what size the exes are
But he followed it up with "just as long as I can at least fit a few critical things on a floppy." !!! So that's far from indifferent! (But I personally think such sentiments, while reasonable, are a lost cause. Almost.) > So do many others. Result: Wing-ZIP 100 MiB ... WinRAR 5.10 beta is less than 2 MB. > Abobe-ACRO 100 MiB ... MuPDF is a lot smaller, the 1.4 version's .ZIP is "only" 9 MB. > "Hello world" 30 Byte's to 10 MiB (depends from compiler) ... * disable code/data alignment (x86 doesn't need it) * optimize for size, not speed * strip debug info (etc.) * keep add-ons as optional downloads * use a smartlinker (--gc-sections, /OPT:REF, -CX -XX) * compress with UPX (or similar) * don't support bloated extra features (if you don't need it) just to be trendy Though a lot of this is just bad (bloated) code generation from compilers. Use a better compiler (PowerBASIC? FreePascal?). Note that relying on MSVCR*.DLL is not worth the tiny size savings! Whatever happened to the idea to "do one thing and do it well"?? It's when you try to do everything that you can overburden yourself. But of course customers demand (more) "features features features"! Obviously I'm not opposed to features, but sometimes minimalism really is better. > Linux 1 to 20 GiB (depends from distro) In fairness, yes, almost all modern distros need about 2 GB (minimum) these days, even FreeBSD. Though "Linux From Scratch" claims to be able to make an Apache-only mini-distro in 8 MB. The problem with Linux (and DOS) is too much fragmentation. Too many choices, too many optional pieces. (Actually, Windows is bad about this nowadays as well.) Okay, maybe "problem" isn't the right word, but it often makes people stumble. Some people just want everything and the kitchen sink all bundled together, and they want it to "just work" without lots of fiddling, downloading, etc. But that's not good for slow connections or legacy hardware, so you have to prune things and split them off sometimes. Unfortunately, that makes things harder to keep track of! And yes, compatibility is also both a blessing and a curse (though I'm partial, obviously). The less you have to do, the easier it is to succeed. But one size does not fit all. >> anyone noticed HXDOS? > > YES. Noticed 10 years ago, development stopped 5 years ago. In fairness, it's quite stable and works fairly well, all things considered. I think most of his recent work has gone into JWasm (et al.) and trying to use those to (re)build HX. BTW, it's impossible for HX to support everything. And if it's not good enough by now (to some people), they'll probably never be happy. >> How long has it been since you've done performance tests on Java? >> JRE 1.5 was a HUGE performance jump from 1.4, and 1.6 was another >> smaller but still significant jump from 1.5. > > The start-up takes centuries, and eats away several GiB's of RAM. > Maybe your test program runs indeed faster for you ... supposing that > that whole thing doesn't crash due to lack of RAM even before. And > I haven't seen (usable) JAVA for DOS yet. There was a commercial Java (1.1? "JavaPC"?) back in 1997 built with DJGPP! (Though I never used it.) I have no idea what happened to it. And modern developers are so annoying that most code probably requires 1.5 or newer (or even only latest / greatest, ugh). So it's probably not too useful for us, even if we could dig it up. You could probably use a third-party minimal Java clone to get halfway there, but I'm not sure it's worth it. At least, from what I can tell, people don't want a minimal console-only language and libs. You know, ANSI C or ISO Pascal is great, but people don't want that simplicity, they want all the non-portable, bloated, complicated, modern stuff. So if you don't have GUI, HD, OpenGL, multi-touch, networking, multithreading, Unicode, 64-bit, garbage collection, tons of libs, OOP, generics, exceptions, etc. etc., well then they don't want it! Nobody wants "minimal"! Even GCJ is not widely used where supported (but doesn't work with DJGPP anyways). At least I'm not aware of a lot of uses. AFAIK, most Linux stuff (70%?) only uses C/C++. In contrast, C# (managed, using JIT) seems pretty popular on Windows. BTW, I'm obviously not saying that nobody uses Java, just that it isn't that widely prevalent on Linux. Presumably big corporate types / enterprise with Oracle contracts prefer it more than home users. (Yes, I'm vaguely aware of IcedTea and Red Hat's fondness for it.) >> > I'm thinking more and more there's no big niche for FreeDos. >> The niche is running legacy software from ye olde days (or similar) > > That niche is filled by DOG-BOX/EMU, but maybe there are other niches left? DOS on modern IBM PC clones have too many hardware compatibility issues: power management, lack of networking (almost no packet drivers), no soundcard drivers (or even static libs), almost no USB support. It doesn't look like most hardware companies care enough to waste time on it. Heck, half the time they don't seem to even properly support Linux. And DJGPP isn't exactly brimming with enthusiastic new users or tons of ports from Linux maintainers either. So expecting anything beyond what we've already got is probably naive (sadly). They probably (rightly? hope not!) think that DOS will really disappear once the BIOS is totally replaced by UEFI in all new OEM shipments. I know some people think some partial BIOS compatibility will be available, but I'm very skeptical. In other words, it's complicated! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start Your Social Network Today - Download eXo Platform Build your Enterprise Intranet with eXo Platform Software Java Based Open Source Intranet - Social, Extensible, Cloud Ready Get Started Now And Turn Your Intranet Into A Collaboration Platform http://p.sf.net/sfu/ExoPlatform _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
