Well, I think that you have to stay within reason with
such comparisons... :} I mean, with blackbox we're
looking at a project that has approx. 680K of source,
and "just" provides an interface to X. The exploded
package has about 1.7M.

KDE's base package exploded is about 58M, and
without the libs nothing will happen :) KDE is an
Application framework, and the interprocess
communication alone should cause enough
overhead to make it slow :) The interesting thing
in this scenario would be what it behaves like if
someone tried to implement it in GTK/Perl or Java ;)

From my own experience I can say that even
jit-compiled Java will be at least 10 slower than
a "native C" application, not to speak of memory
usage. We used to have a little OS/2 pm C&S application
that was working as a stock-ticker with some tracing
& evaluation in my last workplace. It ran smooth on
a 486/66 with 24 MB (the server part). The decision
was made to take the big step and migrate that server
part to Java :) ... the result was a minimum hardware-spec
of a P3-450 with 512 MB RAM, and that was rather
high-end about 40 month ago ;)

Cheers,
Tink

I have been coding since 1968. I started with Cobol, then Basic, then Pascal, then C, Mainstosh C, then C++, then PL/SQL then Java, then csh, ksh, then Perl.

I like C and Perl the best.

If anyone had ever paid me to do Java I could go to work tomorrow. Oracle PL/SQL has paid the bills for 7 years.

For databases I have also done Unify, Paskey(my own written in Pascal), Informix, Ingres, and Oracle.

Oracle is the best DB and the most potential for employment.