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Comment by pvillano | Hacker News Reader

We should have a competition for smallest analog clock in terms of running memory.

Here is the one: Sciter renders: https://sciter.com/temp/sciter-analog-clock.png - it takes 50 Mb of memory for the whole process.

This clock sample ( https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-sdk/blob/master/samples/gr... ) is a port of Mozilla's clock : https://codepen.io/anon/pen/vJpqOY

Chrome needs 6 separate processes to run this sample with total memory consumption of 575 Mb.

I fired up Windows 2.03 in DOSBox, with its clock app, available on archive.org[1], and it took up 60.1 MB. This is fun! I think the OS would run fine (at least, enough for the clock) with as little as 512K of ram[2].

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/09xjyPs.png

[1]: https://archive.org/details/msdos_win2_03

[2]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/32905/windows-versi... ("512K of memory or greater" for 2.03).

If you have screen of size 640*480 and rendering without AA then you can render by CPU. Otherwise, with modern hardware and 200 ppi monitors you will need GPU rendering with the whole infrastructure.

What is that properties window from? That is not the properties window I am used to seeing.

That's Process Explorer by Mark Russinovich

It would probably depend more on the OS and the underlying stack than anything.

E.g. on DOS, with direct memory access (plus maybe some INT 10h helpers to draw the digits; although Windows clock doesn't draw them) in video mode 13h, you could do this with a .COM program that would be under a kilobyte total in and of itself. If you counted DOS itself, you'd still be under 64k.

I just realized my date+time watch uses less than eight bytes of ram, but that's not really the point, is it.

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