Main / News / Learning from the past

There was a time, when 64K was enough.

In parallel to UEFI boot-app development, the GATE framework does provide bindings to Open Watcom and MS-DOS as target platform.

C code is portable, isn’t it?

Modern flat memory models have offered developers so much freedom regarding allocation, that we don’t think about efficiency anymore.

Putting a

char buffer[128000];

on the stack is working on Windows and Linux, but is it really good?

No, because libraries should not assume that endless amounts of bytes are available.
And if we compile against the DOS platform with Watcom C/C++ as classic 16-bit processes, the compiler will show us where optimizations are required.

Breaking large data blocks in smaller chunks also benefits performance and modern platforms and cpu architectures.
Because when data fits into small processor caches, execution speeds up.

So thanks Open Watcom, FreeDOS and DosBOXStaging.

The GATE project always gains lots of improvements when code is ported to support DOS and other legacy platforms.