On 30/10/2011 10:01 PM, Darren New wrote:
> I think this pretty much sums it up.

I haven't seen TP3, but I've seen TB5.5.

In fairness, the IDE is just a program that does some text-mode 
"graphics". (IIRC, it does respond to the mouse - but using a mouse in 
text-mode is just painful.) The IDE doesn't actually do all that much. 
It's a text editor. There's a button that compiles your program. If 
there's an error, it takes you to that line in the program. I believe 
you can also step-debug your code too. And there's online help. That's 
about it, really. You can't have more than one file loaded at once. (If 
you edited the current file, you have to save it before you can open 
another one.) There is no syntax highlighting. There is no special 
navigation beyond what any generic text editor would provide. There's no 
special interface for specifying complicated compiler options. It 
doesn't really do very much.

Now, to the actual claims of the post: I'm not entirely sure I buy it 
that the compiler and IDE fit in 40KB of space. For one thing, I was 
fairly sure that the compiler was a separate binary from the editor. 
Second, from what I remember there's a couple of other files that need 
to go with it for it to work. (You can leave out the help files if you 
don't mind help not working.) As I recall, it would all fit onto a 720K 
floppy and still leave space to actually do some work. The actual 
install media ran to 7 disks.

jQuery is a huge, complex library written in raw JavaScript. It probably 
contains source comments and who knows what else besides. I'm sure some 
of the libraries that come with Turbo Pascal are much bigger than the 
compiled binary for the compiler. (It came on *seven disks*, remember.)

The yahoo.com homepage is utterly encrusted with advertisments and 
stories. It is very graphics-heavy, and it no doubt has a ton of 
JavaScript automating all the flashing banners and blinking lights. (Not 
to mention all the Flash.) Anyone can produce bad websites; Yahoo is 
just one of the better-known examples. (The Wikipedia homepage is 15KB - 
very much smaller.)

An entire OS is larger than a compiler? SAY IT ISN'T SO! :-P

zlib.h - OK, I have no explanation for why this would be more than 1,000 
bytes long. It's only a header file, after all. (IOW, it tells you the 
name of the compress and decompress functions. Unless those names are 
*really* long, I can't see how two function names can be 80KB in size.)

The touch command - no explanation.

The vim quick reference PDFs - well, yeah, there's 8 entire font files 
embedded within that. That'll be why it's so big. (Quite apart from all 
the elaborate kerning commands that TeX typically generates.)

The compiled code for the Erlang parser - Given how trivial Erlang's 
syntax is, I don't really have an explanation for that one. There's 
probably some overhead for having hot-swappable code, but beyond that... 
I don't really have an answer.

The Wikipedia page for C++. According to Firefox, the page itself is 
40KB. Not 200KB. It references two images that are about 40KB each. The 
stylesheet probably adds a few bytes... I'm not sure how the guy came to 
200KB as the total size. But sure, 18 pages of rich formatted text plus 
accompanying diagrams... I guess that's going to be fairly large.

So, yeah. Some things are bigger for a reason. Other things are bigger 
for no obvious reason at all...

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