Re: Code Compression in commercial compilers

"Joachim Durchholz" <joachim.durchholz@halstenbach.com.or.de>
14 Apr 2000 23:49:12 -0400

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Code Compression in commercial compilers richard@imagecraft.com (Richard F. Man) (2000-04-05)
Re: Code Compression in commercial compilers joachim.durchholz@halstenbach.com.or.de (Joachim Durchholz) (2000-04-14)
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From: "Joachim Durchholz" <joachim.durchholz@halstenbach.com.or.de>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 14 Apr 2000 23:49:12 -0400
Organization: Compilers Central
References: 00-04-057
Keywords: code

Richard F. Man <richard@imagecraft.com> wrote:
> Does anyone know if any commercial compiler has been released that
> include full program code compaction ala methods by Mctinosh, or
> S. Liao [ they are not aware of any ] or other people?


Microsoft used such a scheme under DOS. IIRC the tool for packing was
shipped with their C compiler for developers to use.


In typical Microsoft style, the unpacker had a bug that prevented it
from working when the load address was within the first 64k of memory.
This was not a problem with 5.x versions of DOS, but when DOS 6.x
learned to load itself into "high memory" and took less than 64K of
"conventional memory", those programs wouldn't run anymore. Again in
typical Microsoft style, they provided a tool that would eat up any
free memory below the 64k address so that the programs with the buggy
decompressin algorithm would run again.


Regards,
Joachim

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