On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 4:57 AM TK Chia <u1049321...@caramail.com> wrote: > Hello dmccunney, > > > Er, how much do we actually *care* about EXE size on disk? Even folks > > going old skool and trying to run on 808X CPUs are likely to have > > decent HDs.. (Is *anyone* still trying to run DOS (MS/PC or FreeDOS) > > and DOS apps entirely off of 360K floppies?) In that case, UPX may > > Well, I guess we are simply obsessed with code size. :-) I think > generally it is OK to try making programs as small as possible, as long > as it does not add too much inconvenience.
Yeah, obsessed is a good word for it. :-) I'm all in favor of small code size, but you have a trade off. The fastest code is entirely inline. But going that route means larger executables, as code normally contained in libraries and called via functions is instead directly in the code where ever those library functions are used. And many efforts to optimize for size create problems. In general, on larger systems, the compiler can do a better job of optimization than the programmer can, and the trick is setting the right compiler options when you do a build. Some of the games programmers play to optimize directly in their code can fool an optimizing compiler and result in *larger* code. I personally don't care whether UPX is in the mix building this. I can understand the problems of including UPX in a build. I think a fair bit of what we already use has to be built on a larger machine and cross-compiled for a 16 bit target. I'm pretty sure everyone who might *want* to build from source *has* a larger machine where it will be done, and just wants to *run* the code on the low end machine. ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
