Randy:

At 8:14 PM -0500 7/23/01, Hacker wrote:
>...
>Doug Way, about the Smalltalk to C translator. What I really would like to
>have is the ability to translate a Smalltalk application into C code. But,
>as you suggested, a Smalltalk VM would probably be the smarter choice. I
>just worry that the VM will end up being 20Mbytes or larger. As a developer,
>I would prefer a VM of one to two Mbytes for deployment. I've done the major
>shrink and ended up with an image of ~ 800Kb - this may be the best place
>for me to start. I'll look at the GUI-layout tools you mentioned - Thanks!

I think you're really concerned about the total memory footprint, which includes
Squeak VM + base image + application code + storage used by application.

At Disney, we built a prototype electronic guide/map/camera for use
in theme parks. It was a very complete application that was tested by
over 600 guests. The breakdown was:

    Squeak VM: 388K
    Base image: 821K
    Our application code: 380K

On a16 megabyte PDA, we had 13 megabytes available for Squeak's object
heap (after deducting space for the OS, the Squeak VM, and the Squeak VM's
runtime data structures). About 1.2 megabytes of this was used by the base
image plus our application code. The remaining space was used by the application
itself, most of it as a big cache for media. (We had a CompactFlash card
with about 100 MBytes of images, movies, and sound files, so this was a very
media-rich application. This is Disney, after all!) Our system also ran fine on
PDA's with only 8 megabytes of total memory (5 megabytes available for
Squeak's object heap).

In my experience, Squeak operates pretty well down to one
megabyte. After that, it gets tough. You can run Squeak in less, but you
don't have much space for application data. I've actually made Squeak
images for simple applications that were under 200K, but that takes a lot
of packaging work and is probably not worth the trouble. For really tiny
applications, I'd probably turn to the PocketSmalltalk techniques. PocketSmalltalk
is a Smalltalk VM for the PalmPilot. An entire application, including the VM
itself, can run in under 30K. This would be a good approach for memory-poor
devices like cell phones.

Hope this helps.

	-- John