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Dillo - now a graphical web browser for DOS (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 27.11.2011, 15:23

EDIT: Almost forgot ... first things first, big thanks to you guys, Ben and Georg, for your excellent efforts.

> > Sorry ! Silly question. At 30 MB it has to be the Windows version.
> >
> Well, give or take about 29 MB ;-)
>
> The DOS version is actually the largest of them, since unlike the Windows
> or Unix version, it also includes the complete window system and
> graphics/input drivers. (It also has much higher memory and CPU usage, so
> if anyone actually wants to run Dillo on the mythical
> 486 and dial-up mentioned on
> their homepage, Dillo-Win32 on Windows 95 is still probably your best
> bet.)
You'd have to already have Win95, which ain't free/libre. I'm not picking on it, just saying, it's harder to find these days. Honestly, choice of OS matters so little in this case, more important is network drivers.

As for RAM, you're using CWSDPMI, which can swap 'til the cows come home. (BTW, you're using here old r5 from 2000, not r7 from 2010, any reason? r7 works fine for almost everything and is better / faster for big RAM machines. It's considered stable by CWS himself, so I suggest you upgrade, heh.)

> Of course, it's not really a fair comparison since I've been doing the
> Windows version longer, and thus it's much more aggressively optimized; I
> just thought it was an interesting point of trivia.
The higher footprint for DOS is due to the same reasoning: static linking. It's not that DJGPP doesn't have otherwise, but only barely.

For one thing, DJGPP still uses COFF, which clearly isn't a focus for GNU BinUtils optimizations. All their good work seems to go towards ELF.

Secondly, DJGPP 2.03p2 "stable" is still recommended by some people because 2.04 was never finished. The former has only weak DXE1, the latter has better DXE3, which means dlsym, dlopen, etc. are supported (more or less, though latest GCCs 4.6.x seem to have broken this somehow). See Juan's /beta/ port of Lua 5.1.4.

DJGPP's stub loads DPMI if none found and also puts the entire .EXE into memory. I'm not 100% sure on the details, but I guess? a DPMI host could demand page (and perhaps DPMIONE does, dunno), but most don't, e.g. CWSDPMI. So yeah, it loads the entire thing. I think DJGPP v1 did it better, but with v2 they went completely for DPMI (which is why a buggy NTVDM is so painful) to handle their own memory (instead of home-grown extender).

Anyways, DJELF is on the mirrors, so if you really wanted, you could compile with that as it fully supports ELF shared objects. I'm not honestly sure if that will save memory here, as I don't know what the stub does (probably same ol' load all into RAM), but at least the local disk footprint would be smaller (though if Dillo is all you're using it won't save anything as it'll still need everything libc-related on disk). Or use UPX (sorry, marcov). :-P

Honestly, I don't consider 5 MB that big a deal in this day and age, esp. since GCC's CC1 is now like 8 or 10 MB (can't remember), also why it uses so much RAM these days compared to olden times (vaguely annoying but still works, more or less).

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