[fpc-devel] inline... and philosophy

[Marco van de Voort]

Op 09/11/2019 om 15:51 schreef J. Gareth Moreton:
>
> Competitions aside, there are times where space is a premium, whether 
> it be from distributing an application on a DVD, bandwidth or data 
> limits (even some first world countries are still on dial-up in 
> places, or are otherwise monopolised by a single, bad-quality 
> provider), the smaller capacity of solid-state hard drives (especially 
> on some laptops) and can otherwise be a money saver sometimes.
>
Maybe. But what the faq warnes against is in using these kind of 
scenarios to retroactive justify old dos era sentiments.  Even small 
SSDs are huge compared to FPC binaries, and the possible gains are 
really not that high. Constrained pipes usually already employ 
compression, and a few percent really doesn't save that much anyway.

It is not a bad thing to dive into binary sizes, but keep it to the 
point, and try to quantify savings in larger programs (e.g. the compiler 
or lazarus). Get a feel for what changes are worth it and what not, but 
be warned, there is much less to gain than people think.

(and btw, if you are serious about these scenarios, drop all 
optimization work immediately, and start working on packages :-)