Hi Jesse :-) Which tools you want to use to develop largely depends on which existing DOS software you want to improve - you want to use some toolchain which is compatible. If you want to write a new thing for DOS, it simply depends on your personal taste, combined with the de-facto requirement that you should use free, if possible open source, compilers that should run in DOS. You can use some multi platform compiler like OpenWatcom, if you like the ability to cross-compile, but it should at least be possible to compile inside plain DOS itself :-)
QB7 is a bad choice, try FreeBASIC. It even has a QB-style mode and is free, open, portable and 32 bit even in DOS. Which leads to the question whether you want your software to be useable in 8086. Many DOS developers no longer care, but many do. At least for things like the kernel, 8086 support is a must. Having the possibility to compile optimized versions for more modern CPUs is of course nice. If you plan to write, say, a web browser, no "modern" user will complain if at least Pentium is required :-) Turbo C is sort of free, but not open, so OpenWatcom is better. Regarding the multitasking topic: Think about the type of software that people run in DOS. For example a text editor. Now can they run TWO text editors? They can not, because there is no graphical user interface with terminal windows ;-) In that sense, the ways in which multitasking would make DOS better are very limited. If you are really a god in low level programming, it is better for you to write a super smart parallel transfer AHCI / SATA / NCQ / whatever driver with intelligent pooling of delayed writes, while even that does not really help while only one program is running. So the next question is: What are the performance bottlenecks of DOS? Compared to Windows, DOS is totally great at using only very small amounts of RAM. On the other hand, if you have a hardcore gaming PC with 64 GB of RAM, you will be pretty upset to hear of the limitation that almost no DOS program can see more than 2-4. Likewise, DOS is great for not wasting CPU cycles for background activities (again compared to Windows), but you will not like to hear that out of the 16 cores of your cool CPU, almost everything in DOS will only ever use one. On the other hand, I really would not know a DOS-specific task that would actually have advantages from using multiple cores or lots of RAM. Do you know a task? Cheers, Eric :-) PS: The only things on Linux that I do with multiple cores are: Compressing files, compressing videos and digging through large amounts of data. You could try all of that in DOS, but I myself think that it is being good at SMALL things that makes DOS cool. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ One dashboard for servers and applications across Physical-Virtual-Cloud Widest out-of-the-box monitoring support with 50+ applications Performance metrics, stats and reports that give you Actionable Insights Deep dive visibility with transaction tracing using APM Insight. http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/290420510;117567292;y _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
