© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024
W. GayBeginning STM32Maker Innovations Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/979-8-8688-0199-0_9

9. Code Overlays

Warren Gay1  
(1)
St. Catharines, ON, Canada
 

You don’t hear much about code overlays today. With today’s seemingly unlimited virtual memory in desktops and servers, applications often don’t check for the risk of running out of memory. Yet in the early days of the mainframe’s using core memory and the fledgling IBM PC, running out of memory was a frequent concern. Overlays were instrumental in doing more with less.

Overlays continue to have a role today in microcontrollers because of those products’ own memory limits. Embedded products may begin with a selected ...

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