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.

Comments

Re:Stop duplication of effort

[selectspec]

What gcc needs is support from the hardware vendors themselves. If the hardware vendos all backed gcc, the would be doing their customers a huge favor giving them the flexibility to move between platforms with greater ease, and reducing build engineers to a single toolset.

Free software not a dumping ground!

[leandrod]

Yet another company trying to use free software as a dumping ground for useless software. What does Watcom have to offer today? Which vision of the future they have that could offer something that gcc or something the like cannot?

I do not see anything they can offer. Even if they had, would it not be better to just release the source code under the GNU GPL and integrate any valuable part into gcc? Thus they could create a new Cygnus based on their gained gcc expertise. But we do not need yet another also-ran, GPL-incompatible, redundant confused-ideas licensed open-source piece software.

Perhaps some years ago this would have been great. Not it is too little, too late.

Re:Free software not a dumping ground!

[GlassHeart]

Yet another company trying to use free software as a dumping ground for useless software. What does Watcom have to offer today?

Let's see... a student of compilers picks it up, and learns something. The intangible goodwill encourages another company to open something else. We don't lose another piece of computer history.

Not every act has to change the world, you know.

Watcom Memories

[Lucas Membrane]

The IDE's that Watcom had were refreshingly different. Their C++ IDE was good, but when they upgraded the C++, they came out with Power++, which was a very nice RAD product, but it was too buggy. If the compilers are cleaned up and they open source the IDE's too, this might be of value.

What killed them? Did they pull all their brains off C++ to work on PB? Was competition from MS too tough? Was their GUI builder (licensed from some 3rd party) too lame? Was the cost of implementing the C++ standard too high? (Watcom was late to offer STL -- they included their own (way different) libs instead.)

We were a couple of generations back on chips when Watcom pretty much stopped pushing their compiler technologies. I wonder how much they lose by not having optimizations targetting new hardware features.

Sure it is

[Planesdragon]

Yet another company trying to use free software as a dumping ground for useless software.

Maybe you're not up to snuff on the philosiphy of code-reuse and what Free Software means.

If software and code is a commodity, and the value then becomes it configuration/customization, then every little bit of trash that can be opened is a Very Good Thing. If the company was proprietary their entire corporate life, but releases the soruce as GPL (or BSD) when they fold, this is a Good Act and should be Lauded and Welcomed and Thanked.

The darn site's /.'ed--but as long as they use a GPL-compatbile license, there's nothing stopping the GCC folks from pouring over OpenWalcom for anything useful.

Re:Performance comparisons

[be-fan]

I wouldn't accuse ICC of questionable shortcuts. It's generated code works just great. On the other hand, those benchmarks are quite out of date. GCC 3.2.x is *much* faster than GCC 2.95.x (or GCC 3.1.x for that matter). Instead look at these benchmarks which tests GCC 3.2.1 vs Intel C++ 7.0