Re your comment "Well, people did provide you with information on the
enormous amount of code needed for what were, in some cases, only subsets of
ASN.1.", John Lowry also supplied information on the small amount of code needed
for lots of ASN.1, including implementation of the notorious 'ANY DEFINED BY'.
The library functions for our compiler take only 90K bytes when compiled for a
SPARC without optimization. These functions can decode and encode _all_ ASN.1
objects! The extra code required for the ASN.1-defined objects is only the
constructors and destructors, which are quite small -- maybe 100 - 200 bytes.
An X.509 certificate has roughly 15 - 25 such objects, depending on how many
DN parts and AlgorithmIdentifiers are defined, so the cost is only a few
kilobytes. That seems quite modest compared to lots of today's applications.
Charlie Gardiner