> They were really frustrated with the code footprint limitations of the DS.
As in the memory or the final binary size? I would have thought memory management was the tricky part -- even with the mandatory 8 MB expansion in the GBA slot -- but I suppose they would have been under even more pressure to fit it onto the smallest cart possible, with the cost of the expansion pack added for every unit
Now you're making me uncertain. I was pretty certain it was the code/binary footprint. I remember suggesting they look into using any MMU for doing code overlaying/swapping [and the DS doesn't appear to have one...].
The Opera code was very memory efficient after having gone through so many memory usage optimizations triggered by lots of mobile platform ports.
> E: I forgot about the mobile Opera ports, that also tracks - I'd love to read about the engineering that went into them!
Can't really meaningfully expand on that, most of that happened before I joined in 2004, but I can tell you that the fact that Opera was extremely memory efficient made Opera Mini (250M monthly uniques, 150k web page transcodes/s) economically possible starting 2005.
We needed to keep the browser/window state around for each user until they clicked the next link. If we threw it out, any javascript state would be lost.
Reading about Mini doing layout specifically for devices with <128px wide displays, I wonder how well today's responsive design frameworks would deal with that...
Mini did some tricks so the "display" was much wider than the device display but text columns were wrapped at device display width. So you you could zoom out and see the whole page but the text was readable when you zoomed in.
Hi! Do you remember what the limit was that prompted this costly measure? Addressable code space from the CPU? How could there be a limit in the megabytes, not gigabytes? I don't get it.
As in the memory or the final binary size? I would have thought memory management was the tricky part -- even with the mandatory 8 MB expansion in the GBA slot -- but I suppose they would have been under even more pressure to fit it onto the smallest cart possible, with the cost of the expansion pack added for every unit