OpenEuphoria

Re: Listening to newbies

• Posted by Robert Craig <rds at EMAIL.MSN.COM> Dec 15, 1997
• 757 views

Reaper writes:
>> Though this is pointless, this was actually my first question when I
>> joined
>>  the list a year ago. However, no one payed attention to the
>> newbie...   :(

Daniel Johnson writes:
> Probably why nobody seemed interested in my binary include files
> and distributable ex.exe. Has anyone had any ideas or have I just
> tried to revive old talk ?
> Or even worse do you all think they are pointless ideas ?

Reaper - I now remember that the subject of the mouse in 320-wide
graphics modes came up a long time ago. At the time it didn't
sound like a really serious problem, and I thought it might be limited
to just a few weird machines, so I put it on the "back burner" and
eventually forgot about it. - shame on me!)

Daniel - Your ideas are interesting, however I don't know
how one can have a "binary include file", unless it's just a file
containing lots of machine code to be poked into memory.
Separate files of machine code have to be linked somehow,
either statically or dynamically.

Here's an interesting fact: ex.exe is really much larger than
exw.exe, 269K to 140K. It only looks a *bit* larger, 172K to 140K,
because ex.exe is *compressed*. The Causeway DOS extender
uncompresses ex.exe when it loads it into memory. exw.exe is not compressed.
exw.exe is smaller because there is no pixel graphics stuff
built into it.

With "binary include files" maybe you are really looking for
the concept of .DLLs.  RDS could keep exw.exe small, and
put a lot of stuff into separate .DLL files.  You would only
include these .DLLs in your application (i.e. in your .ZIP file)
if you needed them. Each .DLL could have a .e file
associated with it that would make it callable from Euphoria.
In fact anybody can now extend exw.exe in this way.

Regards,
     Rob Craig
     Rapid Deployment Software