To: mcastle AT umr DOT edu (Mike Castle)
Cc: eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il, djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Re: Less for DOS 
Date: 	Mon, 1 Aug 1994 08:47:24 PDT
From: "Marty Leisner" <leisner AT zen>


In message <199407311810 DOT NAA25867 AT saucer DOT cc DOT umr DOT edu>you write:
>
>Are these worthwhile ports to DJGPP?  DJGPP provides a great
>enviroment for porting/developing memory hungry and cpu
>intenstive programs, but for file intensive programs, it just
>plain sucks.  Take a look at the port of the FSF fileutils:
>they're just plain slow.  Unless someone wanted to take the time
>to write a lowlevel 32bit interface to the hardware so that you
>don't have all those RM/PM switches, this isnt' going to change
>(well, actually I shouldn't say that:  does DPMI work better when
>it provides the file services?)
>
>All three of these programs are very disk intensive.  Both elvis
>and nvi do not keep much of the file they're editting in memory;
>instead they keep incremental changes in a temp file (that's why
>you're able to recover so cleanly when using vi and your editting
>session is interrupted).  Becasue of this, using them will be
>pretty slow.
>
>Also I believe all of these packages use termlib rather than
>curses.  This means that termlib will have to be ported, and the
>user must use some sort of ansi.sys terminal interface.  I
>believe that these outputs will result in a RM/PM change for
>every screen update, so even that will be slow.
>

nvi uses curses...there is so much code there, I don't see much
chance of porting to a small model (I only port programs to small
model on DOS).

There are some programs in Undocumented DOS -- one tests system calls in real and protected mode... these a 2.5X penalty for protected
mode (which is good enough).

marty