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Open Watcom 1.0 Released
JoshRendlesham writes "The Open Watcom C/C++ and FORTRAN 1.0 compilers have been officially released. The source, and binaries for Win32 and OS/2 systems, are available. This release also means that outside developers can join and contribute to the project." Or if you prefer, gcc is up to 3.2.2.
Anyway, I'm excited by this because, well, competition is almost always a good thing. Hopefully gcc and Watcom can feed off each other and both products will improve. And perhaps more importantly for the build-everything users, another open source compiler might start moving people (like the developers of autoconf) to better support non-gcc compilers. This way, users who prefer Watcom's (or Intel's, or...) compiler can use it without as much tweaking.
The version of gcc for dos: DJGPP had a DOS extender and 32-bit support but it was slower than Watcom by a large amount.
graspee
Gcc is good, open, and could use some work, so please think about helping out. My favorite is MinGW which is a really nice and decently maintained Win32 version of gcc and binutils. MinGW also distributes MSYS which is a bash shell and other gnu utilities that make a windows box capable of running a Linux configure script. This allows much easier porting of GNU applications to windows and vice versa. There are several GUI compilers based on MinGW too, see the web page FAQ. A nice GUI GCC based compiler for Win32 is Bloodshed Dev-C++, which I've used.
Cygwin is good too but I prefer MinGW (obviously).
So think about helping out, our tools will only get better if folks work on them.
The Watcom compiler is the only compiler that supports writing 32 bit code using 48 bit pointers. GCC only supports code where all the segment registers contain the same value.
Don't laugh, Fortran is still widely used in the scientific field. Optimizing compilers such as the SGI/MIPS compilers do good jobs at generating tight code from Fortran. C and C++ are not the easiest things to optimize automagically.
:))
It's no coincidence that SGI and Cray have excellent Fortran compilers, their customers demand it.
(sorry I spent all of last Wednesday in 2 seminars with a fellow from SGI's Canadian HPC group, I'm still buzzing.
Trolling is a art,
Just wondering what they(watcom) are up to now.
IIRC: Watcom was purchased by Powersoft. Powersoft's main product was a front-end database tool called PowerBuilder. One of Watcom's products was a small database called Watcom SQL. Powersoft bought Watcom so that they could ship Watcom SQL along with Powerbuilder, so that Powerbuilder could run OOTB.
Oddly enough, Sybase bought Powersoft a few years later so that they could use Powerbuilder to compete against Oracle's front-end tools. This meant Sybase ended up with Watcom's assets, even though they were not particularly interested in them.
You can't shut us down! The Internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people's ideas!
What killed them? If you remember when this all was happening, Microsoft was out to take over C++ and all the companies who did cross-platform frameworks were attached in standard MS style. Monopoly money funded subsidizing of their Visual C-- product and MS-MFC. Then when Watcom wanted to include MFC with the Watcom C++ compiler package, Microsoft said that would only happen if ALL other frameworks on the CD were removed. Remember, Watcom C++ shipped with DOS16, DOS32, Win16, Win32c, Win32, OS/2-16, OS/2-32 compilers with the IBM OCL framework and some others like Zinc if I remember correctly.
Watcom would have to eliminate all the support for the other platforms to license MFC and ship it with their compilers. And Microsoft was all but giving Visual C-- away at the time also.
The Watcom compiler was one of the fastest on the market from what I remember. I had heard that IBM used it for the WinOS/2 subsystem on OS/2 to make it a faster Windows than Dos/Windows.
Think about it, Microsoft HATES anything that abstracts the Win32 API and crossplatform frameworks and crossplatform compilers where one of the early targets of the beast in Redmond. Borland was the only one that got any money out of taking Microsoft to court for attacking it's business using illegal means. The others were too small and just folded and looked for other ways to make a business.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
You mean this link? The one that shows GCC matching Intel C++ 7.0 on everything except the P4 FPU benchmarks?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...