4 ms·
i never thought about that, saving bytes even in symbols
by eddd-ddde 3y ago
i never thought about that, saving bytes even in symbols
- Eggsellence 3y agoI think he is suggesting the opposite - use more verbose names for clarity.
- trealira 3y agoYeah, old C compilers would only look at the first 6 characters of a name, and the rest were insignificant. That's how you get nanrs like "strcpy" and "malloc" instead of something like "string_copy" or "mem_allocate" (I still think "memory_allocate" would be long enough to be annoying to type).
- lifthrasiir 3y agoOne of last vestiges of this fact AFAIK was libjpeg, which had a macro NEED_SHORT_EXTERNAL_NAMES that shortens all public identifiers to have unique 6-letter-long prefixes. Libjpeg-turbo nowadays has removed them though [1]. [1] https://github.com/libjpeg-turbo/libjpeg-turbo/commit/52ded8768022ab7e9e7670ddea0ba89e2890b837 https://github.com/libjpeg-turbo/libjpeg-turbo/commit/52ded8...
- nxobject 3y agoIIRC this mirrored the behavior of MACRO-11, DEC's first-class PDP-11 assembler.