slimming the image

Henrik Gedenryd Henrik.Gedenryd at lucs.lu.se
Sun Jul 30 07:51:00 UTC 2000


Dan Ingalls wrote:

> The problem is simply that we haven't drawn appropriate lines between the
> various parts of the system, so when you cut one out, you're left with
> dangling dependences.

Amen to that--and the best example of this is the scripting system, aka eToy
;)

Here are a few hints for shrinking Morphic from my own experience:

Currently "Morphic" is a huge 2.8 MB chunk of the image, but with just an
hour of work I got it down to 1M or by 1M, I don't remember which. The main
part of the time was spent on at all being able to remove the scripting
system from the rest. The biggest part was refactoring the Forms dictionary
out of there and into somewhere else--I think I put it in ImageMorph but
that may not be the ultimate placement.

In all, "Morphic" is too vaguely defined even as a concept, wrt shrinking &
separation. The bulk of it (apart from obvious things like 3D) is taken up
by non-essential things like widgets, various tools, etc.--these aren't
really part of Morphic.

Eventually, I decided to put this off until the project swapping mechanism
was in full effect for this type of job. But drats, I threw away the
refactored code too!

Henrik






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