Path: utzoo!yunexus!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!usc!venera!rod From: rod@venera.ISI.EDU (Rodney Doyle Van Meter III) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: An issue for the entire Amiga Community. Message-ID: <13674@venera.ISI.EDU> Date: 29 May 90 19:53:13 GMT Article-I.D.: venera.13674 References: <1990May17.001308.29541@csmil.umich.edu> <136089@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <11747@cbmvax.commodore.com> Reply-To: rod@venera.isi.edu (Rodney Doyle Van Meter III) Organization: Information Sciences Institute, Univ. of So. California Lines: 36 In article <11747@cbmvax.commodore.com> andy@cbmvax (Andy Finkel) writes: > >I too have wondered why the GNU software hasn't been ported. > >I don't think its the presence of the other bundled or shareware >products, though... Why? Because nobody has done it. I gather it's nontrivial to shift even from one Unix to another, and I've investigated the VMS-specific code, it's large and convoluted. AmigaDOS could be done, I'm sure, but nobody at the GNU Foundation has done it, and I haven't seen anybody here volunteering. One of the biggest problems, the reason you don't see the full GNU Emacs on smaller machines, is that it's a storage pig. Over 650 KB for the executable alone, a quarter of a megabyte in "dump" file it has to read, and 2-4MB of Lisp files for the interesting additions. Add a megabyte in help files and documentation. Plus the fact that it's considered to be preferable to include source, and you're looking at somewhere on the order of 15 MB in disk space. When I run GNU Emacs, the process rarely has less than 3/4 MB in physical memory, though I'm a heavily multi-buffer kind of guy. Don't know exactly how it will fare in a non-VM environment. The startup time is such that, on a machine as slow as most home machines, you'd probably prefer to just leave it running, too. It's only been recently that home computers could afford devoting that level of resources to any particular object, particularly if you want to be doing other things at the same time. If somebody here wants to volunteer to make GNU Emacs run under AmigaDOS, I'm sure we'd all be delighted to use it once you're done :-). --Rod