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

Watcom was great. How about today?

[CresentCityRon]

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!

Performance comparisons

[golrien]

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.

Re:DOS days

[ctr2sprt]

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.

Re:DOS days

[Graspee_Leemoor]

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

Re:Superb!

[grub]

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. :))

What happened to Watcom

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:DOS days

[ma i ude]

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/