On Fri, May 10, 2024 at 1:36 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 10 May 2024, Stuff Received via cctalk wrote: > > I recall that MS sold a Pascal compiler, possibly from someone else. It > was > > very slow and buggy. I heard a story that to speed up disc access, MS > put > > FAT-manipulation code in the actual compiler and that occasionally > destroyed > > the FAT. > > Sorry Stuff, ain't so. > > Bob Wallace wrote the Microsoft Pascal compiler, while he was at > Microsoft. He was their tenth employee. He told me that their runtime > library (which he didn't write) is buggy and slow. > So slow that it made benchmarks with their Fortran compiler (which also > used the buggy and slow runtime library), perform SLOWER than interpreted > BASIC. > I developed quite a bit and for many years with Microsoft C v6.0 under DOS and it was not bad. The compiler was decently fast and once 486s and then Pentiums became available compile time wasn't really an issue. It was actually the least shitty Microsoft product I've ever used, next to MS-DOS 6.22. It was actually pretty good. > If you had FAT corruption issues, perhaps you had SMARTDRV enabled with > write cacheing (which did occasionally mess up the FAT). > A good example of why I generally hate MS software. But the solution was easy: just turn off write-caching. Sellam
