Mail Archives: djgpp/2000/06/01/14:45:20
>Actually, this is one of the GNU coding guidelines; see the file
>standards.info (it comes with GDB, for example). The rationale is
>that, since Unix utilities were traditionally written optimized for
>memory size (because Unix was born on a 16-bit machine), writing
>programs that consume lots of memory will lead to a very different
>design, which will prevent Unix vendors from suing the FSF for
>plagiarism.
I can understand the point of wanting to avoid any possible legal dispute, but
after the years upon years of success that the FSF has had with their software
without said legal problems, why don't they devote a bit of their development
time to making the tools both good *and* efficient. And before anyone says "do
it yourself and submit a patch", I just want to say that I am hardly skilled
enough to do such a thing.
> Don't forget that Watcom (and others) are single-platform compilers,
> while GCC is highly portable.
Watcom
host platforms -> DOS, Windows 3/9x/NT, QNX
target platforms -> DOS16 (MZ, COM), DOS32 (various extender technologies),
Win16/32/NT (executable, DLL, console, gui), Novell NLM, OS/2 (executable, DLL,
presentation manager), ADS (autocad development system), QNX (16, 32),
Penpoint (?). There's also ELF, but it's really buggy and unusable.
It doesn't match GCC in scope of host platforms or target architechtures, but
no compiler I know of can target as many x86's operating systems as Watcom all
in one package (that excludes the myriad number of ports of GCC from this
comparison).
OTO, this is all moot, off-topic, and irrelevent.
AndrewJ
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