[Lazarus] Size of binaries etc.

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
> Mark Morgan Lloyd schrieb:
> 
>> But the bottom line is that the target audience is IBM mainframe 
>> hackers, used to handcrafting assembler and punching EBCDIC with their 
>> teeth. I don't want them to say "Binaries bigger than 1Mb? NBG".
> 
> I wonder how mainframe applications can make use of a GUI at all?

 From my limited experience, either all or none :-) To a much greater 
extent than unix-based systems they rely on having smart terminals to do 
all the interactive stuff, and while waiting for something to happen sit 
there in a halted state (on a test system here, I see a something happen 
every couple of minutes spinning for a couple of thousand cycles).

There's not very much difference between a 3270 terminal (and its 
equivalents from other manufacturers) and a classic web page with 
embedded forms: stuff gets sent to the terminal, the user fills fields 
in, changed areas get sent back. All of the frontend stuff can be 
wrapped in the same sort of GUI as a web browser gets, in fact IBM seem 
to have moved seamlessly to browsers rather than their classic terminals.

It appears than many mainframe people make a virtue of the backends 
being written in assembler, for efficiency and- these days- geek cred. 
And up until around 2000, that assembler was pretty limited, e.g. all 
addressing was based on 12-bit offsets. These days a mainframe can run 
Linux, X11 and so on, but it's not what they were designed for and 
probably isn't the best way of using its specialised talents.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]