[Lazarus] startlazarus and memory consumption

[Marco van de Voort]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 06:40:57AM -0400, waldo kitty wrote: 

> ya know... i guess being so much old school as i am but i still fail to
> really understand why a "splash screen" is really necessary for much of
> anything...  especially if it causes the app to consume a lot more memory
> than truly necessary...

A splash is a GUI embellishment, sure, but it does have a function. It
shows the app is running, and thus avoids multiple starts, and uncertainty
if it is running from the side of the user.

And essentially the whole GUI is redundant, we could just feed the program
a textfile :-)

> and then i stop and look at the mess that GUI apps have to deal with and
> how much memory they consume just to be able to draw one tiny "hello
> world" box on any OS screen with a stupidly simple "close" button... but i
> still wonder where everyone went and why they all decided to stop
> efficient and "bikini" (meaning short and to the point) coding and instead
> have fallen on the wayside with all the others and are now coding simple
> apps that somehow turn out to be way over bloated for one reason or
> another :? :(

Bloated is a subjective value, and as such meaningless. The whole issue is
cost vs productivity, and with the current low cost/MB, and the increase in
productivity of frameworks, the balance tips in that favour of productivity
and managability. And the LCL is fairly small even to most contemporary
frameworks (.NET, JDK COCOA)

That is also why sometimes a couple of units more than strict necessarily
are linked into startlazarus. Periodically reviewing and maintaining this
(and the breakage resulting from it) is time consuming, and 99.9% of the
users won't even notice.

> signed, too old school to understand and keep up with the new way of life :? :(

I'd rather say too much reacting on emotion, and not trying to drill down to
what is really happening.  The quoted figure of memory use is not even sure.

One also step over source/project management issues to easy hoping for an
easy quick fix. 

I think the following section of the size_matters faq sums it up quite
nicely

http://wiki.freepascal.org/Size_Matters#Unrealistic_expectations

And don't forget to need the text in a friendly bold typeface.