From: quacci AT vera DOT com (jon)
Newsgroups: alt.msdos.programmer,comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: 640x480 or 320x200?
Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 15:42:38 GMT
Organization: Yale University
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On Sat, 17 May 1997 23:53:12 +0100, "Green Background Chicken"
<green_background_chicken AT happillama DOT demon DOT co DOT uk> wrote:

>
> >IMO djgpp is much better than anyone lets on.  Look at quake for an
>>example of just what kind of power you can get out of djgpp.  And allegro
>>is a really good game library (IMO), it doesn't have everything, and
>>isn't portable, yet, but 

Jlib is portable- DJGPP, X-windows, Linux, DOS-watcom, maybe more.

>djgpp is crap, producing huge executables, 

Two things to say regarding this size misperception: 
firstly, many people fail to strip debugging info from their finished
executables, because they don't know they can. you just need to link
with the "-s" option, and executables under 200K will normally end up
in the 60k-70k range (an average I tend to get). On top of that, you
have all of GCC's optimizing options- more than any other compiler I
know of, and you can shrink it up pretty well, if for some reason that
is your prime goal. Or make things gigantic.

Secondly, people don't tend to realize that part of the price of a
32-bit protected mode compiler is that a certain amount of stuff has
to *always* be included in the final executables to give it it's
32-bit, protected-mode extended functionality. *This "stuff" is the
same size whether you are compiling a 5 megabyte game or a "Hello
World" test program*. It is a simple *addition* of a fixed amount of
stuff, not multiplication by some factor..

Fact is, if it really matters to you that a piece of code end up
smaller than 60k, then a slower 16-bit non-protected mode executables
is what you want. Fair enough. Or maybe it isn't a compiler you want-
maybe an assembler would be more the ticket.

>wasting drive space with small
>files, 

There is no denying that GPP is big. It is for serious programmers,
and if this sort of disk space is a problem (10-40 meg, almost as big
as an average game these days), you don't want it. Of course, if
someone isn't going beyond "hello world" sorts of applications, you
could throw out 70% of those files; you can already download packages
for djgpp for small footprint. But then, why not just use Qbasic? When
that is what I want, that is what I use.

BTW, if you think GPP is big- incredibly, emacs is even bigger.
Everything coming from unix is big; I think that is the nature of the
beast. In that world, results and functionality are what matter, not
cost.

>slow to compile things

I don't particularly find compile times to be a problem. It is a smart
compiler, and doesn't touch what it doesn't need to recompile. Perhaps
your style is to make a monolithic file with everything in it- then
perhaps it does seem slow. 

What I do like is absolute control over every aspect of the compile,
from optimizing features I see on no other DOS compilers to debugging
features that zero in on problems I've often missed in other
compilers.

> and uses at&t syntax in the crappy assembler.

Ever heard of NASM?
http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~jules/nasm1.html

>Quake would not have been possible without assembly language, and I bet you
>they wrote it in intel format and used a converter on it....

Must have been worth the effort ;)