Mail Archives: djgpp/2001/06/29/01:45:11
On Thu, 28 Jun 2001 23:43:48, "Charles Sandmann"
<sandmann AT clio DOT rice DOT edu> sat on a tribble, which squeaked:
>Commercial software has shipped using DJGPP as the compiler and run-time.
>If you pay for something, you expect it to work on your platform.
Yeah, it was called Quake and it also shipped with CWSDPMI.
>No software exactly implemented either standard exactly that I know of.
And the world ... yup. Still spinning, judging by the continued creep
of stars across the sky out my window.
>0.9 was so weak that no implementation only provided the 0.9 features.
>The 1.0 version was so complicated and rich that noone bothered. Since
>I avoid threads completely without certain key words in the subject, I'm
>not sure what "feature" is being discussed - but I'll guess null page
>protection. If you don't want this feature you can use CWSPARAM on r5
>to set flag "4" and be happily ignorant of programming errors.
You're joking, right? That's not a feature, it's the absence of a bug.
Any host that doesn't trap errors like those has a bug, rather than
lacks a feature, IMHO.
Actually, what was under discussion was its use in auto-detecting the
host vendor and version.
>A signature was added to r5 of CWSDPMI (0x401 - a DPMI 1.0 function) at
>Eli's request. However r4 did not support this, and there are hundreds
>of thousands of copies of CWSDPMI r4 and earlier out there.
And anyone who needs the ident code can get this feature for the
all-time low price of ... $0.00!
>But if anyone really needs CWSDPMI ident code, the page table locating
>code is very specific to CWSDPMI, and works since early betas. However,
>this is a very bad thing to do unless you know exactly why you are doing
>it...
It wasn't for end programmers to mess with; I was considering the idea
of a CWSDPMI with some extra features to add debugging abilities, and
DJGPP startup code changes to detect and activate/support those
features, after it got mentioned that DPMI proper is rather limited
when it comes to debugging support.
>Sigh. It is, by the way. Other people have written their own 32-bit
>environments on top of it, and even embedded it into ROM.
Hm. First rule of open source: it will wind up in someone's kitchen
sink?
>CWSDPMI is small, tight, specialized code implementing a standard.
>While there are some features which help to support DJGPP, I have no
>plans to put anything environment specific into the DPMI provider.
Hmm. Suggests making a CWSDEBUG separate copy then. After all the
production system you ship doesn't need debugging features anyways.
We hope.
--
Bill Gates: "No computer will ever need more than 640K of RAM." -- 1980
"There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of." -- 1980
"This antitrust thing will blow over." -- 1998
Combine neo, an underscore, and one thousand sixty-one to make my hotmail addy.
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