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From: "Mark Habersack" <grendel AT ananke DOT amu DOT edu DOT pl>
Organization: What? (Poznan, Poland)
To: "Colin W. Glenn" <cwg01 AT gnofn DOT org>
Date: Sun, 9 Feb 1997 02:19:47 +0100
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Subject: [opendos-developer] Re: [opendos] 7k mouse driver
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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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