Re: Towards guile-gtk 0.18

[Marius Vollmer <mvo at zagadka dot ping dot de>]

Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com> writes:

> > I'm a bit worried about the size of gtk-glue.c, too.
>
> Some historical perspective: people used to make fun of the Mach
> microkernel because it wasn't very "micro" --- it was bigger than a
> BSD kernel on the same machine.  And it didn't even have filesystems,
> networking stacks, and so on.

[ Yeah, I know.  I'm just about to assess how difficult it would be to
  port GNU Mach to Linux, that is, to use unmodified Linux code for
  the machine specific parts of Mach.  I want to run the Hurd on my
  iMac. ]

> It turns out that a full half of the executable was due to
> automatically generated RPC stubs.

Yes.  I have done some minimal survey and it turnes out that a
libguilegtk without any actual stubs in it has this size

    % size .libs/libguilegtk-1.3.so.0.0.0 
       text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
      36719    1324      84   38127    94ef .libs/libguilegtk-1.3.so.0.0.0

while the regular one has

    % size /usr/local/lib/libguilegtk-1.3.so.0.0.0 
       text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
     295734   36180      84  331998   510de libguilegtk-1.3.so.0.0.0

This might not be very relevant because a glue library is supposed to
contain mostly glue, but it shows that reducing the glue portion of
libguilegtk would have siginificant effects.

- Marius