In the past, the framework was so small that could fit into a floppy disk, with an average application size of 250 KB. After 13 years, the frawework is way larger and it has some external dependency that makes things worse, but it's nothing compared to modern applications. Let me say that the average size is 8 MB along with 2D / 3D engines, Vulkan / Cairo wrappers and the entire GUI system. However, during my latest analysis I noticed that an application with the common library alone is only 450 KB, which is still capable of fitting into a floppy disk. Not bad, considering that today the total disk space required by an application can be larger than 100 MB or 1 GB. With the common library, you still have the full set of containers, networking, multi-threading, ipc, log files, compression and files management.

The core module contains all the code required to handle objects, containers of objects, plugins and serialization, and it's required by the other modules. An application with the core module has an average size of 3.5 MB. I think it can be improved with some optimizations. With some efforts, it can be reduced to 2 MB. From my experiments, I can produce easily a reduced version of the core library which still makes other module works, with an average application size of 600 KB. It would be beautiful for the framework to create a self-contained application with modern graphics and audio which is still under 1.44 MB (a double density floppy disk). I really like the idea. I think I will put some work into this direction, in particular to make demos and games in the future.

I have a huge external dependency to support lot of image formats, like jpg, png, bmp, but also other weird stuff, like paint shop pro and doom textures. This dependency has been discontinued from 2018, it has lot of other external dependencies (most of them are obsolete as well), the API is old and the build system is tricky to maintain. The library has LGPL license, so I can only dynamically link the dll file. Recently, I tried DWorkSim on a fresh installation of Windows 10 Pro and it didn't work because DevIL had issues with the missing CRT files. To fix the issue, I should install the old visual studio redistributables or rebuild the dependency. I don't like it.

To facilitate things, I decided to drop the DevIL libraries for integrating built-in dependency-free image libraries in the framework, like stb from nothings.org, which is compact, functional, well proven and public domain. Of couse I won't have anymore support for lot of weird (and abandoned) image formats, but who cares. I will keep basic support for loading (and writing) bmp, png, tga, jpg, gif, pic, pgm, hdr in my picture module. Additionally, more image formats will be supported through external plugin modules with smaller and sustainable external dependencies, like turbo-jpeg, open-jpeg and libavif. This will facilitate alot the build process and the porting into other operating systems. I already implemented the image import/export part with stb and it works like a charm. Soon I will drop DevIL definitely, so the build will be lighter and it will cover more systems without drawbacks or additional stuff to install.

Lighter is better!