OpenWatcom Team Looking For Help

Spritzer writes "The Inquirer has a short interview with Kendall Bennett, founder of Scitech Software, about the future of the OpenWatcom project. In short they are in need of some talented people with experience in shared libraries and AMD64 extensions. 'Right now the compiler works great on Linux, but all the code has to be static linked and it uses the Open Watcom runtime library. We need the ability to generate ELF PIC compatible code, as well as link against existing SO libraries which would then allow Open Watcom to use the system GLIBC libraries.'"

Comments

No link to Open Watcom itself?

[magores]

Submitter and Editor should be ashamed. Here 'tis

Re:No link to Open Watcom itself?

[reynaert]

Linking to a wiki on the slashdot front page is a not a good idea :)

Re:No link to Open Watcom itself?

[magores]

Fair point.

I'll return to my hole now.

2 simple questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Can somebody explain the potential benefits of using Watcom over using GCC? Is it any real wonder these guys are having difficulty attracting devs using Perforce for SCM?

Re:2 simple questions

[reynaert]

As far as I can tell, its main "feature" seems to be support for various legacy stuff: 16 bit platforms, OS/2, DOS, etc. And some people probably like the IDE.

Re:2 simple questions

[heffrey]

Those people that like the IDE most likely have either:

1. Never seen another IDE, or
2. Never seen the Open Watcom IDE!

It's utter tripe.

Re:2 simple questions

[Anonymous Coward]

I used the Watcom C compiler back in the early- to mid-nineties on QNX, a real-time Unix-like OS. I assume QNX used it as their OS compiler because it produced fast code, but I'm not sure how it compares to Intel's compiler, or even gcc. Anyway, generated code performance would be an obvious reason to choose one compiler over another. Standards compliance might be another.

Re:2 simple questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Watcom has very remarkable points. Very efficient code generation, support for Windows 16 and 32 bits, DOS 16 and 32 bits extenders, OS2 16 and 32 bits. Now generating code for Linux. The best integration between ASM and C/C++ or FORTRAN. Watcom suite also has FORTRAN 77 which is importand for people in the physics comunity.

Armando

Re:2 simple questions

[SpacePunk]

I don't know about OpenWatcom, but I still have the Symantec C++ compiler installed which is based on the Watcom compiler. It is extremely fast, easy, and is a joy to use.

Choice is good

[stikves]

While I will probably never use their tools, I believe that choice in C++ compilers is actually very good.

Remember what happened in RedHat GCC 2.96 case: An upgraded computer with "better" standards support actually resulted in more problems. Many source codes with GCC specific assumptions ceased to compile (inluding the Linux kernel) and everybody blamed RedHat. (Please do not start a flamewar about this).

But if we already had many vendors (like gcc, Intel, watcom), we'd be less likely to run into such problems.

watcom developers

[Anonymous Coward]

shower occasionally

Scitech drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

IDE? Are you thinkng of Sybase's Optima++ by chance? You do know the difference between an IDE and a compiler correct? For example: Visual C++ includes a compiler, but the IDE is Visual Studio.

As for the multi-platform support, I believe that was always one of Watcom's fortes, in addition to the fact that it was the compiler used for PowerBuilder, which runs on Unix, (multiplatform benefit, yeh?) although it was most popular on Windows in the client-server realm.

Actually, what's even more cool than an open source version of an *excellent* compiler is SciTech's work with x86 drivers, one of the companies supporting the open source version of Watcom. Speaking of OS/2, key thing IBM missed was providing good driver support, Microsoft made that a top focus. For Linux to be more competitive with Windows, this is a must.

Code generation, memory models and optimization

[Terje Mathisen]

I used Watcom's compilers for a number of years, mostly to develop code for NetWare, but also for Dos/Windows.

Among the things I really liked was the beautiful integration between C(++) and inline asm code, where you could do stuff like defining an inline asm macro, while telling the compiler exactly which registers/memory areas would be used and/or modified. This meant that the C optimizer could work perfectly well across such asm code.

Terje

Symantec's compiler was originally Zortech

[lotzmana]

I believe that Symantec's C++ compiler is based on the one developed by Zortech (known to people who programmed C in the age of DOS). Presently this is Digital Mars and one of their FAQ pages talks briefly about the compiler's heritage.

I once read in Dr. Dobb's Journal mentioning about Walter Bright acquiring back the rights of the Zortech's compiler after Symantec lost interest in its development.

Re:Symantec's compiler was originally Zortech

[SpacePunk]

That clears that up.

Re:Symantec's compiler was originally Zortech

[SpacePunk]

OH, and thanks for the links. I thought 'it' was dead. This is exciting.

Good code generation

[drenehtsral]

Back in the day I remember testing DJGPP and Watcom against eachother (and against Microsoft's DOS compiler) and being pretty impressed with Watcom's optimization and general cleverness. It was a very good compiler for the x86 architecture of the time, and may still be. My general impression of GCC's optimization features on x86 was not too good. GCC, however, is a fabulous compiler for PPC, MIPS, and ARM architectures.

Does anybody know the current state of the two compilers in terms of optimization on x86?