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."

Comments

Hmm

[cdraus]

They say (on the webpage) that a version is planned for Linux. Do we really need another C/C++ compiler for linux? We'd just end up with the trouble we had on DOS with people writing silly compiler dependent code and everything a big mess.

Re:Hmm

[reynaert]

People are already writing very gcc-specific code for Linux. I've often seen that installation instructions for other Unices begin with 'install gcc'.

Re:Hmm

[BlowCat]

Your question contains the answer. We need another compiler for Linux so that the developers could check that they didn't occasionally wrote any "silly compiler dependent code" without having to reboot or to login to a box with the other compiler.

Actually, more often the code is not silly, it's just that some compilers accept some quirky code, and the others don't.

Bravo!

[maggard]

The more high-quality compilers the better!

More compilers means more techniques applied and evaluated, benefits from compare & contrast, ability to more easily identify errors specific to a compiler and not code, and possibly more generic code in a more diverse environment.\

glad to see them accept donations

[Dr. Awktagon]

I wish EVERY substantial Free/Open software project had a donation page pop up before download. There are several programs that I use regularly for which I would donate when downloading or upgrading.

In fact, Free/Open software is much more valuable to me than the alternatives.

So in other words, I will only pay for Free software! ;-)

(Too bad they use Amazon for their donations, for those of us boycotting them.)

experience with W2K [OT]

[alienmole]

my hopes were high that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.

Yeah, it is amazing how Win2K can keep on functioning even when it is simultaneously infected with Code Red, Sadmind, and Nimda! The data rates produced by virus-generated GET requests are most impressive, and only exceeded by the rate at which IIS with ASP leaks memory. Microsoft and its "professional full fledged development team" have truly reached a pinnacle of performance and stability!

How much use is this in the modern era?

[Ryu2]

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?

Re:How much use is this in the modern era?

[scrytch]

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?

Because that's the same memory model linux uses (except on alphas where it's 64-bit). Or any other OS that supports virtual memory. Before that, in DOS you had to deal with segments, evil nastiness like FAR pointers and so forth.

Re:Ruminations: Will it merge with gcc?

[reynaert]

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.

Re:Eh... Am I missing something?

[n3m6]

From the FRONT PAGE !!!

"When the Open Watcom 1.0 release is complete, the team will be open for general admission from anyone. The Open Watcom team is closed for the initial part of the project due to NCA restrictions with Sybase. If you have any further questions, please visit our FAQ section first. "

From the FAQ

" Is everything that was on the Watcom CD available for free download?

No. The commercial versions of the Watcom C/C++ and Fortran compilers contained licensed copies of the Windows SDK, Microsoft Foundation Classes, OS/2 Toolkit and other commercial tools. Due to licensing issues, those components cannot be made freely available. Hence in order to utilise the 11.0c binary patch release, you will need an official copy of the 11.0, 11.0a or 11.0b installation CD. "



Read the FAQ first please
The release of the path itself shows that the project is under development and it is not dead. However the project needs to solve its legal issues which WILL take time.

i am not a developer nor have any contacts or relationships or sex with sybase or scitechsoft.
Thank you!

Re:Ruminations: Will it merge with gcc?

[reynaert]

since I put the NT 4.0 CD, that came with my computer, in the microwave.

The only acceptable use policy for Windows CD's :)

For those of us youngins...

[--daz--]

... could someone please provide a brief history of what the watcom compiler is or does differently than other compilers, and why it's suited to making DOOM-type games where other compilers aren't?

The OpenWATCOM site wasn't terribly informative. Apparently, this is a big deal since it made Slashdot, but I guess I don't see the significance. Thanks!

Re:For those of us youngins...

[Electrum]

In combination with the DOS/4GW dos extender, it provided a flat 32-bit address space for programming. It also produced the better code than any compiler, by a wide margin. Back then, Microsoft's compiler for DOS was broken (it produced buggy code when optimizations were enabled). Borland's Turbo C++ was cool, and some games used it, like Wolfenstein 3D and Jazz Jackrabbit, but for games for the 486 like DOOM, nothing compared to Watcom. It also had really nice tools, like a cool VI like editor for DOS, an excellent debugger and profiler, and lots of other cool stuff. Not to mention that it would compile for DOS and Windows in both 16 and 32 modes, and OS/2. It was the first C/C++ compiler that I really started using heavily back in the day, and I must say that it was a very excellent product, worth every penny (I even got the student version for $99).

There is probably a compiler or two now that produces better code for x86 (especially PIII and Athlon), like Intel's compiler, but being that most Linux distributions are compiled for 386 or possibly Pentium, there would be a ton of stuff that would benefit from a Watcom compiler for Linux.

My experience with DJGPP and Watcom

[chrysalis]

In the DOS-times, managing memory was a hell. It was both a hell for end-users (having to keep different sets of AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to make different programs work) and for programmers.
The good old Borland C only allowed 16 bits segments. It was really lousy.
There was some hacks to avoid this. I wrote some assembly code to enable the flat mode (only one big linear page up to 2 Gb), and Borland C finally could access 32-bits segments. But the page was still 16-bits by default, so all 32-bits operations had to be prefixed.
I wrote some games and demos with this, but Borland's produced code was very bad. On a version of Borland C, while(1) was compiled as mov ax,1 then test ax, compare with zero and jump if 1 != 0. Awesome.
It's why I tried Watcom. Watcom's code was better. Moreover it had specific optimizations for 486 and Pentium-class processors. And with DOS4GW, it was easy to access 32 bits pages. However :

• The C-parser was buggy. Some absolutely correct piece of source code were misinterpreted by Watcom. For instance, it refused some "const" pointers that were indeed pointing to constant values.
• The compiler was buggy. When some optimizations were turned on, it produced wrong code, sometimes reusing a register while it was still in use by someone else. And it simply ignored the volatile keyword, that was needed for interrupts hooks.
• DOS4GW was cool, but sometimes slow. It was way faster to allocate a big memory chunk at startup and then mess in it, than allocating multiple small chunks.
• Inserting assembly code used a totally different syntax than Borland C.

So Watcom was an excellent compiler, but it was really, really buggy. I always had to review the assembly code by hand. But I liked the fact that "char" was unsigned by default.
Then, I tried DJGPP. DJGPP is a port of GCC to DOS platforms. It cames with a free DOS4GW-like called PMode.
The resulting code wasn't that bad. For floating-point arithmetic, GCC produced slower code than Watcom (can't remember why, maybe GCC didn't use the arithmetic coprocessor). But it didn't matter, demos always use fixed-point anyway.
GCC didn't produce buggy code like Watcom. And the code was...logical. Have a look at Ping for instance. It's a smooth pong-like game with carebears, bonuses, funny sounds, etc. I wrote that game with DJGPP, but if you look at the source code, you'll see that it looks a lot a assembly code. It's designed in a way that the compiler can translate one line of C in one line of assembler, and everything is pre-optimized. GCC respected this. I tried to recompile important parts of the code (sprite routines) with Watcom. The result was illogical. It tried to reorder some stuff, but this only gave slower code.
The first releases of PMode were buggy, too. They worked very bad with Qemm. But then, it got better and finally was an excellent drop-in replacement for DOS4GW. But once and again, allocating a big page was faster than multiple pages.
Why Watcom was cool : fast compiler (gcc was sooo sllooowww to compile), good optimizations for floating-point operations.
Why DJGPP was better : free, comes with emulation of many Unix system calls, gives optimized code if the source code is already optimized. And GNU-assembler syntax is way better than TASM-like syntax.