What’s amazing to me is that for every technical problem, there’s already been lots of people who’ve thought about it and tried to solve it. Given the world population is at some 6 billion, that’s not really surprising, nevertheless it’s very satisfying. Like lately I’ve been having thoughts about writing a small application using the Qt library. I haven’t even begun designing it, I’ve just been doing preliminary research. My concern is that the program should only be a single binary and it should be as small as possible. The reason for this aim is that I want to make it as accessible as possible – it should require only a small download, and no installation necessary. So if it’s a single binary, that’s the easiest way to accomplish this.
But, of course, using any library at all already adds filesize in the shape of dependencies. Since I only want a single binary, I’m looking to compile statically, which will include all the library code that I’m using. Qt in particular, is a huge library. It probably adds up to about 15mb of library objects, and I don’t want all of that in my “little” binary.

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006