2009/8/17 Bradley Lucier lucier@math.purdue.edu:
The "mainstream" computer at my house with the least memory (a four-year-old iMac G5) has 1.5GB of memory, so a 3MB "footprint" for Gambit is about .2% of the memory of the machine.
I have a few Gumstix computers lying around (about the size of my longest finger) that have 64MB of memory, so 3MB is about 5% of the total RAM.
I can't say that making Gambit's minimal memory requirements tremendously smaller is a high priority of mine.
But quite a lot of people are interested in using Gambit on mobile devices with very limited memory and/or filesystem space (e.g. iPhone, or my old Palm T3, although that was asking a bit too much, having to compile to 68k, small section code even though the machine was ARM-based :/).
So if there was a relatively painless way to get all the lovely efficiency and other benefits of modern Gambit, but cut away some unneeded stuff for deployment to low memory platforms, that would be very sexy indeed. I'd try to do it, if I wasn't rubbish at Scheme :D
Oisín