This would previously happen if a segment directive with "dynamic" appeared before the first function in the program. That would cause the resulting program not to work, because the root segment needs to be a static segment at the start of the program, but if it is dynamic it would come after a jump table and a static segment of library code.
The root segments are also configured to refer to main or the NDA/CDA entry points using LEXPR records, so that they can be in dynamic segments (not that they necessarily should be). That change is intentionally not done for CDEV/XCMD/NBA, because they use code resources, which do not support dynamic segments, so it is better to force a linker error in these cases.
It will now grow as needed to accommodate large segments, subject to the constraints of available memory. In practice, this mostly affects the size of initialized static arrays that can be used.
This also removes any limit apart from memory size on how large the object representation produced by a "compile to memory" can be, and cleans up error reporting regarding size limits.
This allows functions that require an OMF segment byte count of up to 128K to be compiled, although the length in memory at run time is still limited to 64K. (The OMF segment byte count is usually larger, due to the size of relocation records, etc.)
This is useful for compiling large functions, e.g. the main interpreter loop in git. It also fixes the bug shown in the compca23 test case, where functions that require a segment of over 64K may appear to compile correctly but generate corrupted OMF segment headers. This related to tracking sizes with 16-bit values that could roll over.
This patch increases the memory needed at run time by 64K. This shouldn’t generally be a problem on systems with sufficient memory, although it does increase the minimum memory requirement a bit. If behavior in low-memory configurations is a concern, buffSize could be made into a run-time option.
Stephen Heumann
mikew50