Obtaining the name of the actual procedure (2)

Does a compiled GFA-BASIC 32 application contain debug information? I got interested and disassembled a compiled (EXE) GFA-BASIC 32 application.

I immediately noted why Avira anti-virus complained about compiled GFA-BASIC 32 programs in the past. The GFA-BASIC 32 EXE application start-up code is quite different from ‘normal’ C/C++, VB, and Pascal applications. In fact, there is no such start-up code! The compiled program immediately calls the exported DLL function ‘GfaWin23_5()’ from the GfaWin23.Ocx runtime. The DLL function calculates the start-address of the main program part and executes it. The entire program is executed from inside the GfaWin23_5() function which contains all start-up and program-exit instructions.

My main concern was ‘how is the stack frame of a compiled procedure initialized?’ More on stack frames see http://gfabasic32.blogspot.com/2009/08/obtaining-name-of-actual-procedure.html.

It turns out that the runtime DLL contains two additional INITPROC() functions; I called them INITPROC_EXE() because the call to INITPROC() in the debug version has been replaced to a call to a EXE specific initialization procedure. It still creates a stack frame, but it is a bit smaller because it lacks debug information. In addition, the EXE doesn’t contain symbol information whatsoever. There is no way an EXE can return information about symbols; procedure and variable names and their locations.