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Open Watcom 1.0 Released

Posted by michael on from the competition-is-good dept.

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.

5 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Re:DOS days by ctr2sprt · · Score: 5, Informative
    Wasn't it the first mainstream compiler to include a complete DOS extender and feature full 32-bit support? I remember wanting it so badly in the DOS days, but I was a broke student and could barely afford the modem I used to download porn. I had to make do with Borland C++ (which was great, but lacked 32-bit support unless you felt like writing a lot of assembler).

    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.

  2. Re:DOS days by Graspee_Leemoor · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  3. Re:Superb! by grub · · Score: 5, Informative

    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,
  4. What happened to Watcom by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:DOS days by ma++i+ude · · Score: 5, Informative
    What exactly did dos4gw.exe do, incidently? I always used to wonder.
    It allowed the programmer to use all of the available memory. Remember when you had problems getting programs running because there was not enough conventional memory (ie. the first 640KB)? Well, dos/4gw made is easy to write programs free of these memory limitations. More information at http://www.tenberry.com/dos4g/
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