Xref:	news2.mv.net comp.os.msdos.djgpp:4890
From:	lehmann AT mathematik DOT th-darmstadt DOT de (Alexander Lehmann)
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Re: Why are they so fat?
Date:	12 Jun 1996 14:31:23 GMT
Organization:	Technische Hochschule Darmstadt
Lines:	34
Message-ID:	<4pmkbr$lt4@rs18.hrz.th-darmstadt.de>
References:	<29C186D7EED AT fs2 DOT mt DOT umist DOT ac DOT uk> <4pk0ea$q12 AT rs18 DOT hrz DOT th-darmstadt DOT de>
NNTP-Posting-Host:	fb0432.mathematik.th-darmstadt.de
To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway:	from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp

Alexander Lehmann (lehmann AT mathematik DOT th-darmstadt DOT de) wrote:

: If you want a real mode compiler, there may be ports of the free pcc
: compiler for real mode, of course, without much optimization and
: probably not even ANSI-C. Less features, but probably also less space
: requirements.

Having browsed a bit through the msdos/c directory on
SimTel/simtel.net, I noticed that pcc in fact isn't free, but is 30$
shareware. There may be other free C compilers available somewhere, I
would guess.

Anyway, when dealing with a large number of compiled programs
(regardless of which compiler) without shared libraries, it should in
most cases be possible to link all programs into a single executable
and choose the program to actually run by the argv[0] program name. A
nice example how to do this is the PBMplus/NetPBM suite that contains
lots of relatively small programs that all use the same libraries and
when compiling them linked together you save a few MBs depending on
the runtime library size. Since djgpp supports links with stub copies,
this works as well as on unix, the only drawback is a larger load
time, since any program loads the complete code (at least I think it
does. On unix, executables are normally paged in when the code is
executed the first time, so large parts of and executable will not
enter the memory if only a limited area of the code is reached).


bye, Alexander

--
Alexander Lehmann,                                  |  "On the Internet,
alex AT hal DOT rhein-main DOT de  (plain, MIME, NeXT)         |   nobody knows
lehmann AT mathematik DOT th-darmstadt DOT de (plain)          |   you're a dog."
!!CHANGED!! <URL:http://www.mathematik.th-darmstadt.de/~lehmann/>

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