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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.
Does this mean that I can finally use the ROTT-source for something else than just looking at? :-)
Back in the days of DOS, if you were a developer, the Watcom C compiler was *the* thing to pirate.
graspee
I used the watcom tools extensively on QNX and they were of excellent quality, this is really good news !
Hopefully this sets a trend.
MP3 Search Engine
use gcc-3.2.1-r6. It really fscks up Gentoo installations, and I don't think it's all that healthy for other distros either.
I'm looking forward to someone benchmarking gcc vs watcom to see how they do.
MP3 Search Engine
In the late 80s (?) Watcom products were really great. They were beating on everything for the Intel platform.
I received the email yesterday about Watcom's "release" to open source. In that email it says that Sybase felt there was no commercial value in the product anymore so they released it. My question is "Has Sybase been keeping this thing up? Is it useful today?" Or is this a scam to try to give life to a dying patient? I mean perhaps people working on this might be better off working on gcc or something.
Thanks!
Another version of FORTRAN! Yeah! Now if I can just find a card punch machine and reader on eBay, I'll have hutled into the 1970s!
1. GCC: My sense is that it is not a very high performance compiler - is that true? Would a better GCC make a big difference to the free software/oss world?
2. Does the Watcom WIN32 binary run under WINE?
I was going to ask if there were any performance comparisons around showing how Watcom performed, but then I realised that anyone with half a brain ran something through Google before Slashdot.
Win32 compilers (not including Watcom - and with good reason, it's a bitch to set up on Win32)
as linked from the djgpp FAQ, some info on DOS compilers.
So, hooray! A lesson in using Google before Slashdot mixed with some blatant karma-whoring.
PS. this is good too.
Sorry, no time to read this now. Will catch it on the repost....
Could someone post information on what companies are using Watcom and which products they've built with it?
This would also be excellent information for Watcom to put on their site. It would give them much more legitimacy.
Yeah. That whole "competition" thing is totally overrated.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Has anybody heard any news recently from Watcom/Sybase about the 370 versions of Waterloo C, WATFIV, WATBOL, Pascal, Basic etc?
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.
Someone you trust is one of us.
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.
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.
Yet another company trying to use free software as a dumping ground for useless software.
/.'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.
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
- I do not see anything they can offer.
They offer:- An integrated IDE
- Source compatibility with MS VC++
- OBJ/Library compatibility with MS VC++ and MASM/TASM/NASM
- Compatibility with numerous DOS extenders
- A far better "MAKE" than gnumake, Solaris make, or MS's nmake
- Open source Win32 compatibility
- Inline assembler that uses the proper IA-32 syntax
I am told, that the sources for the compiler itself are very well structured. I am also told that the sources for gcc are a complete mess.- 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?
The Sybase Open source license protects Sybase. While that's not important to you, it *is* important to Sybase. The open source people have endorsed it as a valid open source license, so that is that.- Perhaps some years ago this would have been great. Now it is too little, too late.
Now on this point you might be correct. However, that remains to be seen.Same here and when I saw what VisualBasic was compared to VX-Rexx, I couldn't figure out why Watcom didn't bring VX-Rexx to the Windows platform.
VX-Rexx was great at quick and dirty applications and prototyping. I remember writing a simple text browser in VX-Rexx when I was building a Java web server. The browser let me write html and push it to the server for testing of the parsing engine.
If you've not seen it, think of it as VisualBasic on steroids. Hey, it used Rexx for one thing and the function browser was pretty cool for it's day. IMHO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
So which is it?
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.
Incidentally, vectorization in Intel C/C++ is a joke. I put so many hints into my code (aligned variables, processed stuff in suitable sized chunks etc.) and still couldn't trigger the compiler to vectorize. It's much easier to insert SSE instructions yourself.
The Intel compiler has better error reporting than MSVC++. I use it when I don't understand why MSVC++ is barfing on my template code. This is more useful than it sounds!
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
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.
One thing I know is that their optimization routine rocks.
Well, optimization routines can be divided into two parts: One is architecture independent (which involves simplification of AST and stuff) and the other is architecture independent. IIRC, their architecture-independent optimization was really great. It can correctly detect redundant codes and simplify it.
I used to be an ASM programmer as I was a performance freak. When I compile my C/C++ program using Watcom, it almost always produced near optimized (i.e. the "gold-standard") asm code. I knew this when I dumped out the assembler code.
I knew that their arch-independent optimization is really good because when you add things such as calculation of busy expression (i.e. expression that you used over and over) and stuff, it correctly cache the calculation before hand. So, you will save a tremendous time, especially if you do it in a loop. The problem was (again, IIRC) that was not perfect and some of the expressions are left undetected. But, that's probably a bug.
IMHO, arch-independent optimization play a lot greater role than the arch-dependent one (ok, some of you may not agree with me). Things like peephole optimization is great, but is of limited usefulness once you apply the correct transformation of the AST and other internal structures.
This is also partly why Intel optimizing compiler is also great. I heard that some of the folks are doing partial evaluation on the code -- which can greatly help speeding up the result. The idea was: If you use a particular routine (like function) only with a handful of value range, it will automatically create a specialized and optimized function for you exploiting the nature of the input values. For example: You probably have seen the routine that calculates (-1)^n used in a routine that calculates x^y. The optimizing compiler thus should be able to generate: return (n && 1 == 0) ? 1 : -1; instead of the looping. This only involves some (expensive) static analyses computations. I have yet to see this in other compilers.
Therefore, this release is really really good thing. I hope that GNU compiler teams would pickup some of their good stuff.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Did you Google?
Let your fingers do the walking...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
- Or is this a scam to try to give life to a dying patient?
No, it is not a scam. Sybase truly does not care what happens to WATCOM C/C++ (so long as it doesn't come back and bite them on the butt.)>>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
Though that didn't stop ID software from using DJGPP to build Quake 1 way back in 96.
Huh?