OpenEuphoria

Re: Multi-Platform Support

• Posted by Daniel Berstein <daber at PAIR.COM> Mar 14, 1999
• 743 views

At 02:59 PM 14-03-1999 , you wrote:
>Dan
>
>  To my knowledge no packer ( exe compresser ) will work on a EXE that
>  contains overlays.

Oh no, it does work. You can pack exw.exe (I tried PE packers) and it will
gracefully execute your Euphoria program (exw myapp.exw). The problem is in
the way BIND.EXW appends data to the file and how exw.exe knows it has
appended code. Basically bind does a copy /b ex?.exe + myapp.ex?. I'm
asking Rob if he can make the appropiate changes so that if you pack
ex?.exe BEFORE binding, it still recognize there is appended data at the
end of the file.

I assume the file size of the interpreter is hardcoded onto the exe, and
that screw things when you pack it. If that is the case the binder (or
bounder?) might instead store at the end of the "compiled" program the
length of the appended data... a simple substraction will show the correct
offset.

But there will be another problem then, utilities like David's resource
builder won't work, in fact any program that appends data at the end of the
EXE will crash program execution. So the REAL solution would be that RDS
provide a new tool (resource.ex?) that allows the developer to append
arbitrary data to a bounded program. A simple LoadAppendedData() function
added to the language will let you access the data at runtime. These
changes/improvements should be easy to implement and would provide greater
flexibility to the developer.

>  If Euphoria uses the flat address model then can you tell me what
>  segment address it uses ? Also if I allocate_low some bytes what
>  segment address this uses. If these are always the same then
>  why isn't there a CONSTANT for these magic numbers in Euphoria.
>  All I want is:
>  An allocate_low function to return a sequence with { segment, offset }

I'm no asm guru, so I don't understand the "usefulness" of this information.

>  A match function that searchs for a BINARY sequence in a memory block

That sounds more useful, specially for those gfx freaks out there ;)
Perhaps such a routine is already done by some Asm2Eu guru (Pete?, Lucius?)
for their graphic libraries.


Regards,
          Daniel  Berstein
         [ daber at pair.com ]