terminfo and curses

[Guy Harris]

> I thought the new curses was supposed to "nifty", "small" and "fast"?
> 
> "nifty" is a matter of taste.
> 
> "small" is a lie.
> 
> "fast"?  It might possibly use less CPU, but it takes twice as long
> to load the programs!
> ...
> Is this true for curses/terminfo everywhere else?

I tried building the 4.3BSD "mille" game with both old and new "curses", and
the new "curses" version was about 30K bigger.  Comparing the
"termcap"-based "ex" version 3.7 with the "terminfo"-based "ex" version 3.9,
the "terminfo"-based version is about 9K bigger, so most of the 30KB
increase is probably due to curses.  CAVEAT:  Under SunOS 3.x, program text
and data sizes tend to get rounded up to 8KB boundaries, so there are rather
large error bars around these numbers.

Note, however, that the version of "curses" that was described as "fast and
small" was the System V, Release 3.1 version.  The version I used above was
the System V, Release 2 version.  The version that you have might possibly
be the S5R3 version, almost certainly isn't the S5R3.1 version (somebody
else may be able to change that "almost certainly" to "certainly" - I don't
think S5R3.1 is released yet); the odds are that it is the S5R2 version.  I
infer from what Hansen said that the S5R3.1 version is much changed from the
older S5R2 version (I know there are a number of changes between the S5R2
and S5R3 versions).  As such, you should wait until you see the S5R3.1
version before you argue with Hansen's claim that it's "fast and small".
-- 
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy at sun.com (or guy at sun.arpa)