Shawn says...
Quote:

Richard/Cappy ... you guys got any comments to add on this thread, whats your views on "the size of kix32.exe" ?




Not really. It's pretty much all been said and I think this thread has probably run it's course.

As I've been asked, I'll pick up a couple of points made earlier and add my own commentary.

KiXtart has grown quite a bit, but that is due to new facilities, not the support of old ones. This is self evident in the fact that the bulk of the current code has come with recent releases. Removing support for older systems will return a very small reduction at the cost of compatibility. Don't forget that the Win9x specific code is stored in an external DLL, and this is required only for specific functionality. The rest of the code is KiXtart specific and API handlers which will be the same regardless of OS support.

Removing "old" operating system support will save you a few external function calls and a couple of string constants (such as @PRODUCTSUITE returns). Let's be generous and say it saves 2048 bytes. It's probably not enough to drop the compiled code below the boundary required to reduce the file size.

You could reduce the size of kix32.exe by (say) having a version without COM automation support, but you could do this just as well by using an older version.

As a quick sanity check, here is a question for you:

Q. What is the most prevalent and probably lamest script interpreter available for the Windows environment? One with very limited features and klunky built-in commands and functions?

A: The batch interpreter, CMD.EXE

Now, how big is yours?