Footprint of Qt under Win CE?

[MartinM]

Hello,

I want to go into developing with Qt under Win CE. so I read a lot in the last days and found many interesting things and tried desktop windows Qt. But one thing makes me fear I could run into problems and that is the size of a program exe and / or the needed dlls.
With Qt for desktop windows I saw dll sizes for basic applications that are far to much for what I think would be ok for a win ce project (Qt4core.dll and Qt4GUI.dll). Now I read about qconfig and that I can customize the contents of the dlls but I couldn't find anything about the possible results. In a whitepaper I saw two values 4.8 MB and 8.4 MB (or so) for minimum and maximum. But what is included or excluded?
So I would like to ask if someone can give more precise values and description and maybe give an aproximate value for this scenario:
An application that uses buttons, labels, single line text entries, combo box,everything controlled by a touchscreen, interfaces will by an RS232 and I2C the last controlled by an external dll that is already available.
Can I also customize Qt4core.dll?
How difficult is it to create these custom dlls, how long will it take probably?

Thank you for any help

Martin

[wysota]

Can I also customize Qt4core.dll?

Yes.

How difficult is it to create these custom dlls, how long will it take probably?

There is a graphical application for enabling/disabling certain features. After using it you just have to rebuild appropriate libraries.

Consider one thing though - if you have 10 programs using Qt you only need a single set of DLLs and they will only be loaded into memory once, so the memory footprint will get amortized across all those applications. If you start stripping Qt from functionality and then you wish to develop some application with a different set of features, you will have to provide a second instance of Qt, loosing the mentioned benefit. Don't worry, your device will do fine provided it has enough memory to hold the code and the data (AFAIR (I might be wrong here) you can't allocate more than 64MB to a single process on WinCE).

[MartinM]

Hello wysota,

thank you for your answer.
I am aware about the purpose of dlls but in this case there will be only one program running and my goal is get the whole thing on a 32MB flash, 32MB RAM board and if I could get it even smaller, say 16 MB flash this would also be welcome.

Can I customize the Qt4core.dll also with the qconfig tool?

Thank you very much

Martin

[wysota]

Can I customize the Qt4core.dll also with the qconfig tool?

Yes, of course. Just bear in mind that if you strip too much, you won't be able to build features that depend on those from QtCore. You can also reduce the size of libraries by using compiler options (optimize for size, exclude exceptions, etc.).