A maybe not so stupid question

[Richard Gaskin]

Romain Lafourcade wrote:

> Here comes the topic of my message : the size of the distribution.
> 
> The Revolution engine weight about 2 MB meaning that even the simplest app
> would weight at least 2MB. It's OK for a "large" app like Photoshop or
> whatever but what about VERY simple things like an utility that batch-rename
> folders ?
> 
> I assume that the Rev engine is made so it is able to translate ALL the
> transcript terms into some non-human-readable machine code.
> The question is : Why put the whole transcript/machine dictionary into the
> final built if it make use of only a part of the language ?
> 
> Maybe that could be possible to offer the Rev user 2 distinct "Build
> distrib" options :
> 
> - a "Development build" that could be used for testing purpose, using the
> regular engine
> 
> - a "Final build", this one being slower, puting into the built app ONLY the
> useful transcript/code translations
> 
> - or maybe if the process is not that slower, only the second option ?
> 
> This could even help make Rev-made apps even faster than they are...
> 
> Please remember this post for next year's "most stupid question of the year
> award"...

There may be some things that could be done toward that end, but I suspect
it would be a very big task which would at best cut the size of the engine
by only a relatively small amount.

The token lists are only part of the equation.  The underlying object model
and the interpreter itself are big parts of it, and not easily broken into
bite-size chunks.

These types of questions bring me back to the "Revolution Virtual Machine":
if there was a generic player containing the engine, the download would be a
fraction of what's needed to run VB apps, and since Win and Linux already
make multiple instances on runtimes we'd only need to figure out a way to do
that on Mac OS to have trule separate apps using the same engine.

But in the meantime, have you considered making only your Browser app into a
standalone, and having your Builder app be a separate stack that runs with
the same engine?  I would imagine that most folks using your Builder would
want the Browser also, yes?

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
 Developer of WebMerge 2.2: Publish any database on any site
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