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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.
Back in the days of DOS, if you were a developer, the Watcom C compiler was *the* thing to pirate.
graspee
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!
Incidentally, if someone can tell me how to prevent loader crashes in "ld" under QNX when there's an undefined symbol in a trivial program that includes "", I'd appreciate it. Nobody in the QNX newsgroups seems to know.
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....
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.
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,
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
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.
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
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.
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
You mean this link? The one that shows GCC matching Intel C++ 7.0 on everything except the P4 FPU benchmarks?
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