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Open Watcom Effort Makes First Public Release
epowers writes: "It's been a long time since /. ran this story, but a few days ago the Open Watcom Project made it's first public release. It's only a binary patch targeted at 11.0a/b owners, but it's still an important roadmark on the way to the planned full open source release of both the Watcom C/C++ and Fortran compilers. Most programmers, particularly game programmers, should remember the amount of prestige id software's DOOM generated for the Watcom compiler and the sudden proliferation of 32-bit DOS games with the tell-tale "DOS/4GW" startup banner. The download is available for free, but Open Watcom requests a $1-$50 donation to help support the development effort required to remove code Sybase doesn't own and to prepare the open source release."
Not a troll. 32-bit flat memory, etc. under DOS was cool in the early 90s, but really how viable is it in this day and age?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
People are already writing very gcc-specific code for Linux. I've often seen that installation instructions for other Unices begin with 'install gcc'.
gcc is portable to dozens of different architectures, and can relatively easily be ported to new architectures or new languages. That's a very impressive feat.
Watcom generates very optimal code for the i386. That's also a very impressive feat.
In other words, but compilers are extremely good in what they are designed for.
Actually, more often the code is not silly, it's just that some compilers accept some quirky code, and the others don't.