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From: flavio@mitisft.Convergent.COM (Flavio Rose)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: To UIL or not to UIL?
Message-ID: <1359@mitisft.Convergent.COM>
Date: 16 Jan 90 20:37:38 GMT
References: <553@tci.bell-atl.com>
Organization: Convergent Technologies, San Jose, CA
Lines: 30

In article <553@tci.bell-atl.com>, kempf@tci.bell-atl.com (Cory Kempf) 
asks whether it's good to use UIL.

The advantage of UIL is that it gives you considerable ability to 
change the appearance of your application by changing the UIL file 
and not the executable.

For example, if you are tweaking the position of a control within 
a dialog box, it's easier to tweak it by recompiling a UIL file 
repeatedly than by recompiling a C file repeatedly.  UIL compiles 
a lot faster than a C link/compile.

To give another example, if you are interested in having versions
of your software in foreign languages, you can put all the language-
specific stuff in the UIL file and use a single executable for all
languages. The same can be accomplished with message libraries, but
UIL files have the advantage that you can tweak dialog box geometries
to accomodate the fact that translated text can be longer or shorter
than the original.

The major con I've noticed is the extra size. Use of UIL without shared 
widget libraries aggravates still further Motif's already notorious 
memory performance problems. If you use UIL, your image will use
all the code that knows how to parse and load UID files. What is more,
your image is also going to reference all the widgets that UIL knows 
about, even if your UIL files don't actually use them (because how does 
the linker know you aren't going to use them? it can't go out and read 
your UIL files). This can make your image much larger (depending on how 
many widgets you would have used anyway and whether you've put the Motif 
widgets in a shared library).