Windows devs rerolled old code to save precious bytes
OS PLaTFORMS
There was a time when Microsoft cared about every KB
Microsoft's latest Windows update might or might not have improved performance for the company's flagship operating system, but there was a time when its engineers cared about performance. A lot.
Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen on Monday hearked back to that time by telling another war story from the glory days of Windows, when a team was working on an x86-32 emulator for an unnamed processor (though it isn't particularly difficult to identify potential candidates).
The emulator used binary translation – native code was generated for the original x86-32 code. Chen explained, "This offered a significant performance improvement over emulation via interpreter. You can imagine that x86-32 is just a bytecode, and the emulator is a JIT compiler."
The team came across a function that needed to allocate 64 KB of memory. Simple enough stuff – check that...
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