Re: How small could you get GnuStep?

[MJ Ray]

Helge Hess:
> Ok, I expressed it in the wrong way. I agree that X11 as a protocol is 
> probably not to heavy and has indeed nice features like network 
> transparency. Point is, X11 based Qt and Gtk+ failed initially on PDA 
> being too heavyweight, they removed the X11 server, now it works just fine.
> Even if the TinyX, which probably wasn't used in the first Linux PDAs, 
> only consumes 700KB as written on the website you refer, 700 KB are 
> still a *lot* of RAM on a PDA just for driving the display system.

Point is, many of the people trying to evaluate X11 on PDAs probably didn't
know what they were doing and were just trying to use some general-purpose
implementation on the PDA.  This sort of stupid evaluation is seen again and
again and again: for an example closer to desktop environments, look at
KDE's early evaluation of using an object broker.  Using a general-purpose
CORBA ORB was never going to give the performance.

I remain convinced that using X11 is most likely to be the way for portable
computing devices (rather than PDAs) to become really useful and that the
Qtopia/toolkit-naked-on-framebuffer idea is a temporary aberration.  For
PDAs, 700k is a lot, but then the Sharp's firmware is not light either.  A
simpler toolkit is probably required, but then general computing isn't a
concern.
-- 
MJR