🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep27.082317.191310@zeus.calpoly.edu> cambler@zeus.calpoly.edu (Christopher J. Ambler, Phish) writes:

 > Specifically, hints to increase heap memory, how to virtualize large
 > data objects, and determine often swapped function calls begging to
 > be put into root are a good start... 

I tried using .RTLink on one of my projects recently. (The project
involved using Novell LWP TCP/IP libraries and Magma Systems Mewel
[substantial subset of Windows API in text mode] libraries.) I had very
good success letting .RTLink automatically decide what could be put into
Virtual Memory pages. Even without turning VML on (e.g. having it
emulate Microsoft Link as much as possible), I noticed that my
executable size went from 380Kb to about 295Kb. .RTLink reported that
executable to require 314Kb to load. I then turned on VML, using the
output of VMARFGEN to decide what could be virtualized and what could
not, made one manual change (WINALT.c in Mewel cannot be virtualized, it
does nasty interrupt handling stuff), and the new executable required
only 173Kb to load. 

The documentation that comes with .RTLink strikes me as very good and
well worthwhile reading; unlike most programming tools, there seems to
be almost an overabundance of documentation rather than too little. Be
sure to print out some of the .HLP files on disk that relate specifics
about using .RTLink with specific compilers and library packages.

I was unable to get profiling to work after playing with it for a couple
of hours. This is unfortunately, because the profiling functionality
documented in the manuals looks very powerful -- capable of providing
all the information you need about which functions should be put back
into the root image for performance reasons, not to mention localizing
where optimization would be worthwhile.

For virtualizing large data objects, I would take a look at the overlay
chapter in the manual. It clearly states that managing large data
objects by overlays is easier than in Virtual Memory pages if you want
to be able to change the data in a persistent way. If you are using
Microsoft C7, you might also want to take a look at section 4.7 of
"Programming Techniques", which talks about the new virtual memory
manager in C7 -- it looks like Microsoft has provided new run-time
library routines which have similar semantics to Windows calls to
allocate and deallocate memory for data.

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