Re: [iPAQ] Getting Initimate and Famliar to play nice.

On Fri, 30 Mar 2001 1:51p, Jan Harkes wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 03:53:04PM +0100, pounderd@psion.net wrote:
> > >snip<
> > >Some form of compression for some types of files would help too.
> > >snip<
> >
> > I think most of the executables are already gzexe'd. Is there such a
> > thing as bzexe? Is it possible to compress .glade files? xml tends to
> > take up
>
> I would like to state that solutions to save diskspace like gzexe are
> not that useful, especially on an iPaq. Yes, they will allow you to cram
> more executables on a disk.
>
> However, in order to run the application they need to be decompressed.
> The decompression is done to an allocated area of memory (malloc or
> anonymous mmap), this memory is not shared between running processes and
> cannot be 'paged', i.e. under memory pressure the executable code has to
> be written to swapspace.

Some good points here. gzexe is not a complete solution to solve all space
problems but *could* be useful for selective applications.

One problem is it wastes memory becuase it defeats the demand loading of an
executable because it needs to be completely decompressed before it can be
run.

Anyway that aside, the glade xml files is a different issue which I have an
idea. The XML files can be quite large, however when they are loaded they are
parsed to produce a tree in memory. Why not load and parse the xml to produce
a tree, then dump the tree out as a binary file, possibly using zlib to
compress it. Then when the glade files are used, you load them and uncompress
them in to memory and you have saved space and saved yourself having to parse
the xml.

-- 
Regards
John