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Open Watcom Pre-Release Now Available

Posted by timothy on from the watcom-bagels dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I hadn't looked at it for a while, but it seems that the best compiler of the DOS ages has finally reached a pre-release version. openwatcom.com has finally released some source code. Now it'll be interesting to see how the Watcom compiler fares when compared to gcc/g++ on linux platforms. Hopefully both projects will also be able to benefit from one another."

3 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. Re:pardon my ignorance, but ... by sporty · · Score: 3, Informative

    MS-DOS means nothing in the case of this compiler. It was a good optimizing compiler. I'm sure that gcc could benefit in some areas that watcom excelled and vice versa.

    --

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    ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only

  2. Re:pardon my ignorance, but ... by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 5, Informative

    Watcom was for years considered the best optimizing compilerm much better than VC++. The reason "DOS Era" was mentioned because it was the best in the DOS era, before the days of Windows and Win32 flavor of the day complexity that pretty much forced you into some kind of toolkit like MFC and OWL. Watcom lost becuase it didn't really support these, not because it's compiler was bad.

    The compiler doesn't list Linux as a target, and even if it did, I doubt if folks would switch to this compiler, too many gcc'isms in the kernel, and folks are just too used to gcc. But since it's open source, the optimizations may cross over, though I'm not an open source licence lawyer, so i don't know if the OpenWatcom license is compatible with cross-breeding with gcc. The only real issue I can think of is how well does it optimize for the latest generation of chips, Athlon and P4. I haven't followed Watcom development so I don't know if they're up to date on the latest chips (website didn't mention).

  3. Been out for a while... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... I've got the src zips with a file date of 02/08/23.

    In the grand scheme of things, I doubt the compiler means much any more. Sybase rested far too long on their laurels, considering the Watcom compilers were EOL'd in late 1999 (IIRC). Fortunately, instead of letting the code rot, they've done The Right Thing [tm] and allowed it to be OpenSourced.

    Of course, it doesn't hurt that SciTech Software has a not inconsiderable interest in Watcom. And, believe it or not, some people *do* still program for DOS. But the only reason to use Watcom over, say, DJGPP, would be for code that's written specifically for Watcom in the first place.

    If you're interested and/or want to contribute to the OW project, there's two newsservers - forums.powersoft.com and news.openwatcom.org, where you can submit enquiries and whatnot.

    Oh, and you can make the pre-release OpenWatcom binaries work with Mircosoft's Platform SDK, if you really want to. Another alternative to Visual Studio, if you don't mind a crappy IDE (real men use Makefiles anyway, right? :)