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> but in absolute terms I still consider that quite large --- to put things into perspective, a full installation of Windows 3.11, the OS with all of its inclu

> but in absolute terms I still consider that quite large --- to put things into perspective, a full installation of Windows 3.11, the OS with all of its included applications, is less than 20MB. that really depends on the application though. say you want to make a media player, you likely want to embed FFMPEG and that alone will be heavier than windows 3.11 because there are so many codecs today. Likewise for an image editor, you're gonna have to pack a whole lot of image format encoders / decoders. Also note that Qt can basically run as-is on top of a linux kernel, directly rendering to the framebuffer and doing everything itself so it'll mechanically be a bit heavier than something like wx which uses the OS widget APIs instead.... but won't be able to run in place where there are no "OS widget APIs" (that is, 99.9% of embedded platforms), while Qt has that as a main market.

userbinator 6y ago
you likely want to embed FFMPEG and that alone will be heavier than windows 3.11 because there are so many codecs today. Likewise for an image editor, you're gonna have to pack a whole lot of image format encoders / decoders. As someone who has written some video and image decoders --- 20MB is still very large. Minimal-complexity H.261 through H.263 decoders are in the "dozens of KB" range, and optimisations in Asm are unlikely to make them that much bigger. ffdshow, an all-in-one codec that can decode and encode a few dozen formats, is 2MB and that not only includes code that does the real work, but also the COM-based bloat of the DirectShow API it uses. A GIF decoder is a few KB. JPEG is also roughly the same, maybe slightly bigger, and PNG is around that size too. Also note that Qt can basically run as-is on top of a linux kernel, directly rendering to the framebuffer and doing everything itself So does Windows (on top of DOS.)

userbinator 6y ago

you likely want to embed FFMPEG and that alone will be heavier than windows 3.11 because there are so many codecs today. Likewise for an image editor, you're gonna have to pack a whole lot of image format encoders / decoders. As someone who has written some video and image decoders --- 20MB is still very large. Minimal-complexity H.261 through H.263 decoders are in the "dozens of KB" range, and optimisations in Asm are unlikely to make them that much bigger. ffdshow, an all-in-one codec that can decode and encode a few dozen formats, is 2MB and that not only includes code that does the real work, but also the COM-based bloat of the DirectShow API it uses. A GIF decoder is a few KB. JPEG is also roughly the same, maybe slightly bigger, and PNG is around that size too. Also note that Qt can basically run as-is on top of a linux kernel, directly rendering to the framebuffer and doing everything itself So does Windows (on top of DOS.)