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Author Topic: Mac application size trivia  (Read 5276 times)

Offline afb

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Mac application size trivia
« on: November 30, 2006, 02:12:59 am »
The current Mac application bundle is 45M, which breaks down to:
  • 15M wxWidgets (unicode)
  • 15M application + library
  • 15M plugins + contribs
Compresses to 14M using regular zip, or 13M with bzip2 (not used).

All code is Universal Binary, which means it has both ppc and x86.
It is stripped of debugging symbols though, or it'd be like 250M...

The MacPorts packages are available in separate powerpc and i686
arches, as well as linking to external libraries for wxWidgets et. al.
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Offline thomas

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Re: Mac application size trivia
« Reply #1 on: November 30, 2006, 05:20:28 pm »
Quote from: afb on November 30, 2006, 02:12:59 am
All code is Universal Binary, which means it has both ppc and x86.
It is stripped of debugging symbols though, or it'd be like 250M...
Wouldn't it be worth making two separate packages?

Already had that same issue when Apple moved from the excellent 68k to this PowerPC rubbish...
Overnight, you had 200% executable size, 60% performance, and 450% crashes on an expensive piece of hardware which was supposedly a lot more modern, faster, better, blah blah, compared to the old one which performed just fine.
The famous "fat binaries" were one of the reasons (together with the abysmal performance and stability) why I trashed my PowerMac back in the late '90s.
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Offline afb

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Re: Mac application size trivia
« Reply #2 on: November 30, 2006, 05:36:23 pm »
Sure, we can split the arches and wxWidgets out into several packages...
(I am doing a framework zip for wxWidgets anyway, for development.)

Will be more hassle for the user and less "Mac", for a smaller download.
Unless having a 15M download is a problem, I wouldn't recommend it ?

My recommendation is to leave that kind of tweaking to the MacPorts
packages, and leave the main Mac OS X package as Apple recommends.

Tradeoffs, tradeoffs
« Last Edit: November 30, 2006, 05:38:34 pm by afb »
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Offline afb

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Re: Mac application size trivia
« Reply #3 on: November 30, 2006, 05:41:03 pm »
Quote from: thomas on November 30, 2006, 05:20:28 pm
Already had that same issue when Apple moved from the excellent 68k to this PowerPC rubbish...

You will find that both "transitions" have had a lot in common, and both have been very successful.
(i.e. ship new programs with multiple binaries, and provide an emulator for the old chip binaries...)
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Offline afb

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Re: Mac application size trivia
« Reply #4 on: December 01, 2006, 11:38:51 am »
The PPC application bundle is 27M:
  • 6M wxWidgets (ansi)
  • 6M application + library
  • 15M plugins + contribs

Compresses to 9M using regular zip
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