[BusyBox] vi applet for busybox and e3

Sterling Huxley sterling at europa.com
Fri Apr 6 06:49:13 UTC 2001


On Wednesday 04 April 2001 11:37, you wrote:
> On Wed Apr 04, 2001 at 08:52:23AM -0500, David Douthitt wrote:
> > It sounds like a nice idea - I may check it out.
> >
> > However, I may stick with e3, which provides for vi, emacs, pico,
> > nedit, and wordstar emulation in less than 20k total.
>
> Last I tried, e3 only did all that for the x86 asm version.  The
> C version had a fixed pico-esque interface and the code seemed quite
> unreadable -- it still looked very much like a direct port of the asm
> to C (which always comes out bigger and still looking very much like
> asm).  e3 is an impressive piece of work, don't get me wrong.  But for
> busybox, at least, readable/maintainable wins over small.
>
>  -Erik

E3 is a brute force translation from the asm code. There is only one routine,
main().  The variables are all named after x86 registers.  You can follow the
logic without much difficulty. The hard part is knowing which register
contains what data and when it is valid.  The author knows what is going
on, but I would not like to try making a change to the code.

Sterling





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