On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 9:45 AM, BartC <b...@freeuk.com> wrote: > On 05/10/2016 22:34, Chris Angelico wrote: >> >> On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 6:35 AM, BartC <b...@freeuk.com> wrote: >>> >>> This is exactly why I persist with my own language implementations. My >>> current one is only 1/5000th the size but standard libraries are >>> included!) >> >> >> Yes, it has all the standard library that *you* expect. Does it have >> what some random person on the internet will expect? Here are a few >> examples from the standard library of Python: >> >> * Unicode character names and categories >> * Date/time manipulation >> * Arbitrary-precision rationals >> * Statistical functions >> * zlib (zip/gzip) compression and decompression >> * sqlite3 databasing >> * BSD sockets >> * Various internet protocols (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, IMAP) >> >> And that's not even counting the stuff that, if it were proposed >> today, would probably be pushed to PyPI. Standard libraries tend to be >> fairly large because they're catering to a lot of people's needs. Mind >> you, two gig is still a lot, I'm not denying that; but you're saying >> that yours is half a meg, and I doubt that a full-featured language of >> today can exist inside a floppy disk. > > > No, it doesn't have all that. But believe me, even with all those things, > and even if it worked, a 2GB language implementation is *MASSIVE*, not just > a lot.
Yeah - I agreed with you on that. 2GB+ is huge. But if you try to keep your language ubertiny, you're going to have a _lot_ of people complaining that your stdlib doesn't have <X>. > Even Python, not exactly small, is only 2.5% the size (for 3.4 and > presumably including all the libraries in your list). Right. I didn't calculate the percentages, but my cpython/Lib directory is something like 40MB. You could shrink that down a ton by eliminating the tests and zipping the rest up, without losing primary functionality, but it'd still be a good solid bit - about 5MB. > As to what it consists of, well it doesn't include any How-To videos which > would account for much of it. But it does seem to have MSYS (ie. half a Unix > system, 200MB); Mingw (a gcc C compiler, 350MB); docs (180MB); and a library > (1300MB, but looking at it much of it seems to be useless junk). > >> (Also, does your implementation compile directly to machine code, or >> does it depend on something else? It's easy to make something small if >> it depends on another compiler/interpreter.) > > The language in question is interpreted. It depends on a > compiler/interpreter which is currently a 300KB executable but could end up > a bit bigger. The most basic libraries are another 60KB (which will probably > end up inside the executable). The only dependencies are what is already > present in an OS (msvcrt.dll for example). Ignoring OS-provided deps is perfectly fine. But if, for instance, your program emits C code, then it depends on a C compiler, which adds to the effective download. > Small languages are perfectly viable: the JIT version of Lua, for example, > is only about 225KB, and is very fast. > > If I wanted to send you program.lua, and you didn't have Lua, I only need to > add luajit.exe and lus51.dll (for Windows). With my system, it would be > program.q and r.exe, even for multi-module apps. See above about how restricted the stdib is. Lua, on its own, is not a full-featured language for writing general-purpose applications. It's designed to be embedded in something else, and it's great at that, but it doesn't have all the features of a modern apps language. You could write an Ook interpreter in a handful of bytes of code, but it's not what you would write an app in. Since you're talking about Windows, I grabbed file sizes for Windows installers; for Pike, the .msi file is a 24MB download, and Python clocks in variously at 18MB (32-bit 2.7.12) up to 28MB (64-bit 3.5.2 full installation). Those kinds of figures are pretty reasonable for full-featured language interpreters. You get enough for it to actually be usable as-is, but you're not getting a full C dev environment. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
