Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!aw0g+
From: aw0g+@andrew.cmu.edu (Aaron Wohl)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Need better linker for MPW C
Message-ID: <gWS6Fuy00WA1ANG0Zm@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: 29 Apr 88 11:09:46 GMT
References: <4603@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Organization: Carnegie Mellon
Lines: 50
In-Reply-To: <4603@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>


I ran into the same problem.  In my case most of the static space
was in double quote literals.  I made up a preprocessor MPW tool that
removes the double quote literals and replaces them with a macro.
The strings are loaded at runtime from a resource file.  This cuts
data space usage from one byte per string character to 4 bytes per
c source file.  If this doesn't free up enough space change a few
large arrays to be pointers to malloced(NewPtr) memory.

The preprocessor is available from [ghostwheel,128.2.35.1] via anonymous
ftp as the file gstring.tar.  (gstring, strip down to the most bare that
is legal).  Don't forget to transfer it in binary mode.
See the sample .r file and Makefile for how to use it.

The following are handled:
A sample expansion for file barf.c:
#include <stdio.h>
main()
{printf("hello world\n");
 printf("foo\n");
}
becomes:
char *qv_barf;
... expansion of #include <stdio.h> ...
main()
{printf((qv_barf+0L));
 printf((qv_barf+14L);
}

So executable code works well.  Initilized statics are more trouble.
Statics declared inside functions are not handled.  Private staticaly
allocated strings (with 'static') become global.
[static] char *string1="s1";
 this becomes
char *string1=0L;
 with code to initilize the string at startup

[static] char *str_array[]={
 "ar1",
 "ar2",
};
This is initilized at startup in a similer fashion.

[static] char mumble[]="mumble";
This is left as is so sizeof(mumble) works.


Well anyway, gstring is rather ad hoc and doesn't handle everything.  It
did save the day in porting a large unix land program to the mac.

Aaron Wohl (aw0g+@andrew.cmu.edu)