Hi, adding to the wishlist... > IMHO, both are needed: DJGPP is perfect for compiling Unix tools. > Openwatcom is very good for new or simple programs.
DJGPP is good for tools which would suffer from the usual real mode limitations (only little memory reachable directly / usual pointer trickery problems) - as long as you accept that the resulting binaries will need a 386 and will be somewhat big... OpenWatcom is better for "typical DOS programs" for that reason. Yet, it cannot beat Turbo C for REALLY small programs, alledgedly because the Turbo C library functions are more spartan. For example RXCOPY with Kitten (gotta update that soon - forgot to translate confirm dialogs and to fix some bugs) gets quite a bit bigger when compiled with OpenWatcom. On the other hand, I would be happy if the OpenWatcom 386-optimize functionality would actually use 32bit registers. Not sure how hard it would be to add that feature and how big interest in that is. For now, we have that "EMM386 init destroys 32bit registers, FS and GS", minus "OW does not use 32bit registers anyway" with as a result that our 386 optimized kernel NEITHER uses FS / GS nor 32bit registers until EMM386 gets fixed. I wonder how much better the remaining optimization is compared to a 286 optimized kernel, but as far as I remember, OW has no optimize-for-286 mode that would allow us to test that. If OW would support 32bit registers, I think our 386-optimized kernel could be optimized quite a bit further compared to the current version (as soon as the EMM386 incompatibility is resolved, either by writing a 2nd version of the device-call which would be slower but foolproof and which would be used in initdevice or by adding some pushs and pops to EMM386 itself). Just dreaming ;-). Eric ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
