Re: The History of the ALGOL Effort

On 11 Sep 2006 23:56:23 -0400, Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com>
wrote:


<snip>
>
>[That's not really what he said on page 56. OS didn't have dynamic
>linking in the modern sense. What it did have was the ability to
>allocate storage dynamically to each program. OS programs used static
>overlays extensively, probably too extensively. IEWL, the link editor,
>was heavily overlaid so it could run in a tiny amount of storage, like
>8K bytes, at the cost of dreadful performance as it read in all those
>overlays. But in the 99% of the cases where it had a whole lot more
>than 8K available, since the overlay structure was fixed at link time,
>it still did all the overlays and was just as slow. One of the nicest
>things about virtual memory is that it automatically sizes to the
>amount of real storage you have, so if you attach more memory, your
>programs automatically run faster. -John]


I would have thought that it would have been possible to relink IEWL
into a single module with no or a few larger overlays. (Always
assumming you had a larger partition available). I would have to dig
out the manuals to see how to do it.


It's been 30+ years since I did a sysgen, and I no longer remember any
details. :-)


--
ArarghMail609 at [drop the 'http://www.' from ->] http://www.arargh.com
BCET Basic Compiler Page: http://www.arargh.com/basic/index.html
[You probably could have relinked it with all its CSECTs in one area,
but I don't know anyone who did. -John]

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