BAD BAD bloat (was Re: What to do with modules now ...)

On Mon, Jan 11, 1999 at 05:40:32AM -0800, SL Baur wrote: I looked at the code. Making things like X11 and TTY code loadable is no more bug-prone than, say, MULE :-) Seriously though, its not as big a deal as you think it is. We can forsee problems way into the night, and nothing will change. However, if we actually TRY something, and it works, why not keep it? I would love to see XEmacs distributed for all platforms that can support this technology, to have not only the ability of any external package to add to XEmacs in C, but to have large portions of XEmacs itself loadable, and installed with the binary. Just as the user can extend in Lisp, but also gets a standard set of Lispy things in the dumped emacs, so they can extend in C and have a standard set of modules that get loaded based on their environment. With a bit of careful planning (which in reallity makes the code much more flexible for OTHER changes) we could make large parts of XEmacs optional. I dont buy the argument that everything that is unused is swapped either. Most systems have limited swap space, and why waste 20MB in swap if we only need to waste 5? Why have hundreds of extra shared pages when we really only need a few? Too often over the last 10 years the trend in programming has been "oh well, some other technology can cope with the excess, I'll just do things the easy / quick way". That way lies madness. dBASE-III shipped on 3 360K floppies. dBASE-V on 18 1.2MB ones. Spot the problem? Emacs used to be a 700K binary. Now its a 2.6MB image and thats excluding all of the shared libraries that it loads. We CAN stop this excess. -- J. Kean Johnston | "If equal affection cannot be, Engineer, SPG | let the more loving one be me" - W.H. Auden Santa Cruz, CA +---------------------------------------------------------- Tel: 831-427-7569 Fax: 831-429-1887 E-mail: jkj(a)sco.com