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by alexlarsson
2674 days ago
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> As an uneducated estimate (from someone who has written compilers and GUIs entirely from scratch) I'd say 100K of additional statically linked object should be enough for almost any desktop application. This is completely misguided. For a modern UI library it is very very hard to figure out what code is actually used. Say we load the ui description from an xml file. What controls get used in the app then? Maybe the xml has a webview control in it? Then we can't drop the webview dependency. Then your app needs to load an icon, which typically goes via some generic image loading API. What types of loaders are there? Can we get rid of the gif loader (and dependencies)? If any single image file reference is not hardcoded in the binary, again we can't. Want to script your application in lua/python/js, and let it call into the UI library? Then we have to assume that basically any code can be reached. Static linking like this just is not realistic. |
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Maybe it's possible, though, if we remove a little flexibility and flatten the dependencies, such that the application hardcodes a little more of what actually happens (e.g. specificies the file formats for image loading, the format of the ui description, etc).
This is the way I've done my own GUI application, where I simply coded what should happen, and created widgets as I needed them, and all the important decisions were known statically. But maybe this amount of specification is not what people expect from a standalone GUI library.