Hi, On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 1:52 PM, Mercury Thirteen <mercury0x0...@gmail.com> wrote: > > No problem! Yeah, PowerBASIC was a great product which produced some of the > fastest apps around.
"Fast" is subjective (unless you mean compile-time speed, which I'm assuming here). There are too many diverse x86 machines (with different speeds) to call anything universally fast anymore. > It was a pretty phenomenal compiler, but as you point > out, nobody wants to have to buy a compiler anymore. Au contraire. In reality, most compilers are proprietary (and very very expensive). So GCC and Clang and such are actually the rare exception rather than the rule. Also, there are hundreds of programming languages (and cpus and OSes), and apparently no one group targets very many (anymore? did they ever?). It's quite disappointing how few compilers themselves are actually portable. http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html > Plus now with the likes > of GCC, Open Watcom, FreeBASIC, et al., you really no longer have to > purchase a commercial product to get awesome optimized code output. Again, "optimized" is subjective. There's too many x86 machines (let alone others) to call anything absolutely optimal anymore. GCC has had tons of work put into it over the years and had many releases, so yes, it's fairly good at a (semi-)wide selection of processors, depending on version. OpenWatcom is of course much less popular than GCC for its own development and thus weaker but is still also relatively good. Too bad most people ignore it. (I still haven't tried the unofficial 2.0-pre builds.) FreeBASIC is not officially "optimizing" like the above but still behaves loads better than a toy. It's quite robust, all things considered. Honestly, writing and maintaining a compiler is very hard work (not that I would know personally). My favorite these days would probably be FreePascal. Their work (esp. considering the low amount of volunteers) is very impressive. > My apologies also for drifting off course! > > [/OffTopicSideDiscussion] > lol Well, this is freedos-devel , so I don't know where (or what) would be more on-topic. Perhaps more actual development (and sharing code) since some rare person here may frown upon abstract discussion on compilers and such in general. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming! The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
