Mail Archives: opendos/1997/02/08/22:44:06
Once upon a time (on 7 Feb 97 at 21:10) Colin W. Glenn said:
> > > C or ASM is fine. I personally would prefer that DOS code is
> > > written in ASM as much as possible though. Reason: SIZE!!!!! I
>
> IF the driver is compiled by a Good Compiler, it leaves a tiny footprint.
I think that in case of a mouse driver the compiler used doesn't matter. Code
in the driver deals primarily with hardware interrupts, maintains several
structures and not much more (well, the software interrupt handler may be
large, but it does not use any C library calls - or at least few of them).
The code doesn't call into C library often, so it doesn't contain much of the
burden usual apps do. The routines used in mouse driver written in C are
probably those to allocate and maintain memory pools, do screen I/O and
possibly file I/O. Now the size depends on the routines volume - if the
library used belongs to the glorious kind of fatware (which is the case with
M$ C lib - btw. mouse driver from M$ uses the buffered/formated I/O routines
which is what gives it such a size), then we have 90KB .exe to deal with.
However nobody forces the programmer to use the compiler's libraries, right?
Even with C the code may be really small - take Turbo C for example. It is
able to create applications smaller than 10KB in tiny model.
> > Hope that's useful, and hope there isn't a huge mouse driver thread
> > coming..
>
> Eeek! There's a mouse in my filesystems thread!
*I do hope* it *won't* create a mouse thread... ;-)))
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