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From: scc@cl.cam.ac.uk (Stephen Crawley)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.unix.wizards,comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: Big Programs Hurt Performance
Message-ID: <1070@jenny.cl.cam.ac.uk>
Date: Sun, 4-Oct-87 01:04:57 EDT
Article-I.D.: jenny.1070
Posted: Sun Oct  4 01:04:57 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 12-Oct-87 22:29:37 EDT
References: <1665@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM) <8579@utzoo.UUCP) <6886@eddie.MIT.EDU) <2498@xanth.UUCP> <818@sugar.UUCP> <948@jumbo.dec.com>
Reply-To: scc@cl.cam.ac.uk (Stephen Crawley)
Organization: U of Cambridge Comp Lab, UK
Lines: 22
Summary: Xerox D machines do it right.
Xref: mnetor comp.arch:2603 comp.unix.wizards:4831 comp.os.misc:282

All this talk about huge programs being bad and shared libraries being
good, and Jim Gettys mention of X servers and X applications prompted 
me to take a look at our X10 server for XDE (i.e. for a D machine)

The size of XServerConfig.bcd file (the load image) is 27,648 bytes.  

Admittedly, it is not quite a complete implementation of X10.4 yet.  
On the other hand, it includes the code for a pinger tool to start 
an xterm on a remote machine.

So why is it so small?  Mainly I think it is because it uses the XDE 
runtime library for almost everything.  The only significant exception
is in the code for painting the bitmap, where the implementor found
that X's model of bit painting didn't map efficiently onto the XDE
library routines.

A possibly relevant statistic: the source code for the complete server
is 7708 lines of Mesa code.

-- Steve

"My other machine's a Dorado" ... wishful thinking!