Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> An entire OS is larger than a compiler? SAY IT ISN'T SO! :-P
> >
> >    "Image" means "jpeg".

> How do you take a picture of an OS?

  "iPhone 4S" is not an OS. It's a cellphone.

> after all, 10MB is enough space to store the contents of 
> an entire *library*, right?

  Not really. A medium-length book may well take 1 MB to store, especially
if you store layout and style as well.

> >    zlib consists of a lot more than just two functions. There are probably
> > at least a hundred functions and a couple of dozens of types. (For example,
> > zlib contains wrapper functions that simulate the usage of the standard I/O
> > functions.)

> And here I was thinking it just takes data and returns compressed data...

  It's not that simple. There are many places where you could be reading
from or writing to. For example if you want to decompress from RAM to RAM,
that's a completely different process than if you want to decompress from
a file to RAM streamed (iow. you don't want to load the entire compressed
file to RAM at once). Compressing is even more complicated because you have
all kinds of options. Then there are utility functions to make this process
easier so that you can skip the nitty-gritty details if you don't care about
them.

  (Remember that zlib is in C, and hence there's not much abstraction.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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