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From: hsgj@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Dan Green)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga good for hacking??
Message-ID: <370@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Date: Mon, 9-Mar-87 00:29:05 EST
Article-I.D.: batcompu.370
Posted: Mon Mar  9 00:29:05 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 10-Mar-87 19:14:23 EST
References: <2719@well.UUCP> <2705@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: hsgj@batcomputer.UUCP (Dan Green)
Distribution: world
Organization: Theory Center, Cornell University, Ithaca NY
Lines: 47
Summary: Getting LATTICE exe's smaller

NOTE:  This note is *not* meant to start compiler arguments.

Lattice is always flamed for producing large code.  For instance, a
file compiled with Manx might be 10Kbytes, whereas the executable
from Lattice might be 25K.  Those of us who have Lattice can get
around this shortcoming by simply not including the Lattice lc.lib
"library", and linking with AStartup.obj instead of Lstartup.obj.

What you lose is stdio.  In Intuition or Graphics/Sound oriented
applications this is no loss at all.  If you need to read files,
you can use AmigaDos directly instead of fopen(), etc.  Losing the
string routines (strcpy,strlen, etc) is a shame, but these are
easy to write.  What I did was spend an hour writing those stdio
routines that I needed, and just linked that file along with my
application.

The real bugger is mult and divides.  Lattice *stupidly* handles
these by function calls, (eg CXM33) which are in lc.lib.  The amiga.lib
has IMulU() and IDivU() to multiply and divide 16-bit USHORTS, but
this means you have to explicity convert.  For example:
x = a * b;  ==>  x = IMulU( (USHORT)a, (USHORT)b );

BENEFITS:  Doing this extra work results in much smaller code.  A
heavily Intuitioned application of mine went from 26K to 14K when
these techniques were applied.  If you think about it, aside from
the string ops not much of the stdio lib is frequently used, so there
is not really that much work to do (Again remember that all the file
i/o stuff is replicated in AmigaDOS calls, such as Open, Seek, etc).

MAJOR DRAWBACKS:  Bye, bye portability and maintainence!!  It is very
difficult to keep translating the stupid mults/divs, and if AmigaDOS
is ever replaced, your application is dead, whereas if you relied on
stdio all you'd have to do is recompile.

*** FLAME ***:  Why does so much of lc.lib get included, even if it
is not used?  If this was fixed (by BLINK (the official linker, these
days) or Lattice) all would be well.

CONCLUSION:  If you are stuck with Lattice (it is, after all, blessed
by CBM) then if you take some time you can shrink code size down a lot
for applications that are very Amiga specific by getting rid of lc.lib.

-- Dan Green

-- 
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