On 11/8/2017 10:26 AM, Jim Hall wrote: > Not sure why DeSmet wasn't well received long ago, but I think this is > a Good Thing to see. I'd love to see DeSmet included in the next FreeDOS. Well, a lot of people here, in particular Arkady (who hasn't been around for quite some time, who didn't seem to like that it doesn't have a Borland style IDE) and Rugxulo (Mr.GCC, for whom it seemed to be too small) and a few others made all rather disparaging comments when I made a post that it had been made Open Source. > Since it's GNU GPL, and produces 16bit binaries with the different > memory models, then this would be a great fit! Well, the last part is a bit of a "restriction" (not in my personal experience though), as it only supports two memory models, Small and Large. And one thing that a lot of people disliked was that it uses it's own object format and linker. That was something I was trying to look into back then with Bill, but then both ran short on available time and lost contact to Bill. The main reason why Mark DeSmet used not a standard (well, that was a bit of a stretch anyway back in the early '80s) .obj format was that the debugger included was well ahead of what was available on any other C compiler back in those days, where you might have had to make due with DOS' good ol' DEBUG... ;-) > > I haven't used this compiler before, but now I'm interested to try it > out this weekend! Took you long enough... :-P Just be aware that it is kind of "old time programming" (as an analogy to "old time hockey" , where you would have to get your hand blo^H^H^Hdirty...)
What I think makes DeSmet C a good fit is that it will run on FreeDOS itself just fine, which OpenWatcom doesn't do. And as far as being maintained these days, it is on par with OpenWatcom, which hasn't seen any work at all for 6 1/2 years now and even then, DOS support seemed to rather a burden to those few people that were still working on it, And the attempt to fork it and produce a v2 branch on GitHub seemed to have had a rather detrimental effect on that whole compiler project as well. And it might be in fact much easier to make fixes to the compiler (to tune in on the often recited but rarely followed Open Source mantra, particular from the FSF crowd), as it focuses on a single CPU target (8086/8088), on a single OS (DOS), without having to wade through all the C++ and multi-platform fluff that comes with all the other compiler behemoths... Ralf --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
