Hey :-)
> what Apple does with Xcode, they provide an IDE, LLVM (and GCC) and > Swift along with sample code, an SDK and documentation. That mainly is because Apple is Apple ;-) In DOS, you get very far with a standard C library, good old OpenWatcom or DJGPP, in the latter case even similar enough to the Linux GCC and G++ C and C++ infrastructure to ease porting of things to DOS. As DOS does not provide GUI, networking or other fancy things as part of the operating system itself, you can use existing popular C and other libraries for that (Watt32, Wattcp, SDL, FLTK, ...) without being bound to a specific choice. The better libraries of course also come with sample code and documentation :-) Our distro could include some of the more popular libraries, giving people a nice starting point for their projects :-) Regarding OpenWatcom, NASM, RBIL, Japheth's HX (and JWASM!), I agree that those are nice things to include :-) Some are rather large, but I have seen people make compressed basic OpenWatcom install files that fit on one floppy. It is always hard to get a good balance in what to include. FreeBasic and FPC etc. are not very small, but e.g. the set of pre-ported things for DJGPP is outright huge. You could even have a distro just for DJGPP. I hope Rugxulo can help you getting that HX download uploaded to a place where it is easier to get than from the web archive. Note that RBIL already tells quite a bit about XMS and EMS, so having the spec as separate document is just for added detail. In particular, XMS is relatively easy to use even if you do not have a library for it. Using XMS or EMS with old (C) compilers can take some effort (memory models and low level stuff to get into the way, maybe) but to be honest, why take the effort for manual memory management at all? Simply use any protected mode aware compiler (DJGPP or a larger memory model in OpenWatcom) and DPMI and other DOS extender things will magically work for all your basic needs. Note that when you go that direction, it will mean that you have to avoid assumptions about direct raw memory access (screen buffers and such). If you do want that, you will have to take some explicit efforts, but there is some sample code on the web to help you out :-) Or just use one of the existing GUI toolkit libraries to do the work for you :-) Regards, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
