LiveCode 7.0.3: a new meme

[Richard Gaskin]

Michael Doub wrote:

 > I must say that I agree with Eric on this one.   I never use Unicode
 > and the size and performance penalties do not seem like a reasonable
 > tradeoff.   I do understand your point about having to maintain
 > multiple versions.  I would suggest that solving selectively removing
 > the unicode dictionary is the highest priority (if that is in fact
 > the cause of the bloat.).   If the size is perceived to be too big
 > for use, then the issues of bugs and performance are indeed secondary.

I also have a strong emotional attachment to having used an engine that 
provided so much for so little disk space.

But it really was very small, arguably more so than it's now big.

One of the smallest apps on my Mac right now is Apple's calculator, 
weighing in a 9.5 MBs, or their Font Book at 16.4 MBs, compared to the 
LiveCode 7.0.3 runtime engine that does so much more in just 12.9 MBs.

I've discussed with Ben the possibility of factoring Unicode out as a 
separate component, and while there may be ways to do that for some 
things it seems unlikely for Unicode.  Unicode is strings, so anything 
that uses strings, from scripts to fields to all object names - it's all 
seamlessly Unicode now.  Too deep for too little ROI.

If you any of you find yourself getting bad reviews or streams of 
disappointed emails from customers about your app's size, let's collect 
those comments and revisit the issue with RunRev to look for other ways 
engine size may be reduced.

But as it is, when we look at the other apps on our hard drives, while 
LC 7 looks bigger when comparing it to older LC versions, it doesn't 
look so big comparing it to other shipping apps.

Sure, there are some.  Maybe even many.  But then there are many more 
that are much, much bigger that few complain about:

iCal: 56.8 MBs
Stuffit Expander: 54.9 MBs
Firefox: 167.3 MBs
iMovie: 236.7 MBs
GarageBand: 300.2 MBs
iPhoto: 387.9 MBs
LibreOffice: 597.2 MBs

With LiveCode, stack files are relatively small.  So when we bind those 
to the runtime engine, the size doesn't get that much larger than the 
bare engine itself.

With lots of media that can grow, but that's not a function of the dev 
tool at all, as lots of media will take more space in any app.

Starting with 12.9 MBs for a simple app may seem like a lot (esp. if you 
don't notice the size of other apps on your HDD), but then you can 
multiply your app's features while growing your app's files size only a 
little bit.

I'd like to be able to go back to delivering uncommonly tiny apps, but 
as a developer I notice these things, while apparently few end-users do.

So let's see how things go.  Deploy great products, and if the worst 
thing anyone says about your app is that it's 20 MBs you're off to a 
good start, and we can work with the team to see what might be factorable.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  LiveCode Community Manager
  richard at livecode.org