On Monday, 8 September 2014 at 08:06:37 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Sunday, 7 September 2014 at 21:03:17 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev
wrote:
The 438-byte "Hello, world" program is achieved using
Crinkler, which is a COFF linker with aggressive compression
and header optimization. It was created for compressing 4K
demos.
Pretty nice! Is the format correct too, or can it break on OS
upgrades?
From the Crinkler manual:
COMPATIBILITY
-------------
The goal of Crinkler is for the produced EXE files to be
compatible with all widely used Windows versions and
configurations. As of version 1.4, the EXE files produced by
Crinkler are, to the best of our knowledge, compatible with
Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8, both 32 bit
and 64 bit versions. They are compatible with Data Execution
Prevention and with execution hooks that inspect the import or
export table of launched executables (graphics drivers are known
to do this).
It is not a primary goal of Crinkler to anticipate
incompatibilities that may arise in the future as a consequence
of new Windows versions, graphics drivers or other widespread
system changes. Guaranteeing such compatibility would require
Crinkler to follow the EXE file format specification to the
letter, precluding most of the header hacks that Crinkler
utilizes in order to reduce the size overhead of the EXE format
as much as possible. Rather, we strive to continually monitor the
compatibility situation and release a new, fixed version of
Crinkler whenever a situation arises that affects the
compatibility severely (such as a new, incompatible version of
Windows). This has occurred several times already throughout the
history of Crinkler.
Each new version of Crinkler not only produces executables that
are compatible with the current majority of targeted systems. It
also includes a way of fixing old Crinkler executables to have
the same level of compatibility. See the section on recompression
for more details on this feature.
This compatibility strategy ensures that intros made using
Crinkler will continue to be accessible to their audience, even
if the Windows EXE loader changes in an incompatible way that
could not be anticipated at the time the intro was produced.
