DOS ain't dead

Freepascal 3.2.0 release candidate (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 29.04.2020, 09:22

Not to be off-topic or waste your time, but ....

Our discussion of CMOVcc (686+) made me wonder about some things. But I still don't have any reliably good benchmarks for that, so I dunno. I'm pessimistic.

Anyways, I vaguely remember rebuilding AdvanceComp (advzip, advdef) years ago (since he only cross-compiled with an old compiler) for noticeable speedup. Latest DOS releases (at least 2.1 from 2018), IIRC, have the dreaded CMOV, which I doubt helps overall speed at all. It can still be quite slow, especially for lots of files (and still needs DOSLFN loaded due to tmpfile, doh). It should be mostly cpu bound, though.

I know that doesn't tell you much, but I did run "advzip -z4" on 3.2.0 RC1's .ZIPs to save a little over 3 MB. (Size matters! Well, not really.) Just bored and curious, I suppose. (N.B. it recompresses with an improved Deflate, and it removes EOS markers, but I don't think that breaks any obvious decompressors.) This is just one minor size optimization that I've mentioned (in vain) before.

So maybe I should cross-compile ADVZIP.EXE both with and without CMOV (-march=i686), and see the speed difference.

Complete thread:

• Freepascal 3.2.0 release candidate - Laaca, 30.03.2020, 20:41 (Announce)
  • Freepascal 3.2.0 release candidate - marcov, 31.03.2020, 10:00
  • Freepascal 3.2.0 release candidate - Rugxulo, 31.03.2020, 19:37
    • Freepascal 3.2.0 release candidate - Laaca, 01.04.2020, 23:34
      • Freepascal 3.2.0 release candidate - RayeR, 02.04.2020, 14:57
      • Freepascal 3.2.0 release candidate - marcov, 03.04.2020, 14:53
        • Freepascal 3.2.0 release candidate - Rugxulo, 12.04.2020, 14:10
          • Freepascal 3.2.0 release candidate - Laaca, 12.04.2020, 16:41
            • Freepascal 3.2.0 release candidate - Laaca, 25.04.2020, 19:01
              • Freepascal 3.2.0 release candidate - marcov, 26.04.2020, 17:54
                • Freepascal 3.2.0 release candidate - Rugxulo, 29.04.2020, 09:22
                • Freepascal 3.2.0 release candidate - Laaca, 29.04.2020, 23:03
                  • Freepascal 3.2.0 release candidate - marcov, 30.04.2020, 19:48
                    • Other bug - Laaca, 14.05.2020, 10:08
                      • Other bug - Laaca, 14.05.2020, 20:38
                        • Other bug - Laaca, 20.05.2020, 22:49
                          • Other bug - marcov, 22.05.2020, 19:16