Executable Compressors

An exe packer is a utility to reduce the size of executable files. It compresses a program and creates a new program with the compressed data and code to extract and run the original. Commonly used compression techniques include variants of Run Length Encoding and members of the LZ family of algorithms.

It's debatable whether there's still any real benefit to compressing exe files. Originally the reduced storage space would have been an advantage as would the slightly reduced disk (or even tape) load time. Nowadays the potential benefits are lower network bandwidth and smaller downloads.

Exe compressors present some interesting challenges for a programmer. The effectiveness of the compression has to be balanced against the size of the decompressor. The compression algorithm has to be chosen carefully for speedy decompression. If the program has a relocation table, what's the best way to optimise it? How can the additional memory requirements be minimised?

It shouldn't come as any surprise that hundreds of programmers have risen to the challenge and written an exe packer. A quick search of the net turns up at least 80 for DOS / Windows and several for other environments.

In 8086 assembly, a Run Length decoder for a DOS .COM file can be written in under 40 bytes and decoders for the simplest LZ77 derivatives in under 50 bytes. Here's an example RLE decoder:

; 8086 .COM RLE decoder

move:   ; copy unpacker and compressed
; code elsewhere in memory

mov si, unpack
mov di, freemem
mov cx, codeend-unpack
push di
rep movsb

; setup RLE paremeters

mov si, freemem+code-unpack
mov di, program
mov bx, num_of_tokens

; transfer control to unpack

ret

; unpack compressed program

unpack: push di
rle:    lodsb
cmp al, token
jne single
lodsw
mov cl,ah
db 0F3h ; rep
single: stosb
dec bx
jne rle

; transfer control to program

ret

code:   ; .....

codeend:

If you have any thoughts on the advantages / disadvantages of exe packers or any implementation ideas I'd love to hear them. Also does anyone know anything about the history of exe packers? The earliest I've found is from November 1987.