Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!oliveb!felix!preston
From: preston@felix.UUCP (Preston Bannister)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Fast program loading with RELOC
Message-ID: <80988@felix.UUCP>
Date: 26 Jan 89 19:52:08 GMT
References: <930@philmds.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@felix.UUCP
Lines: 33

From article <930@philmds.UUCP>, by leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit):
> There is one little gotcha with programs marked 'position-independent':
> the program file that was just read in, is left open. This is a bug in
> the old Roms; it could well be solved in TOS 1.4. In practice this
> means you can run about 43 of these programs, and then you're out of
> file descriptors 8-(. Also when you try to run a non-program file (not
> 0x601a as the first word), GEMDOS correctly generates an error, but
> leaves the file open.

Along with the RELOC utility came a little program for the \AUTO folder that
is supposed to address exactly this problem.  While the author was not
certain that his solution was bulletproof, I have not (yet) run into a
situation where it has failed.

> And RELOC should better clear the BSS, or else your C programs will
> break, 'cause GEMDOS does no clearing in this case (not explicitly
> initialized global and static data must be initialized to all zero
> bits; this is guaranteed by both K&R and the dpAns).

It does, or more precisely, the code it appends on the end of codefile does.

> The idea of RELOC is however appealing; if only it would be able to
> get rid of the open file descriptor...

All I can say is that for my usage (gulam,make,cc,grep,find,emacs,etc.) it
does seen to work, and work well.

--
Preston L. Bannister
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