From: Mark van der Aalst <flux AT stack DOT nl>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: DJGPP -vs- Watcom?
Date: 28 Jul 1998 14:23:47 +0200
Organization: Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
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To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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Critofur <cmiller AT sgi DOT com> wrote:
> Hello,
>   I was hoping to use DJGPP & MGL to do some game development - once the
> game was done I was planing on porting it to Win98/NT for greater
> marketability/user base (I would perhaps still release a DOS/DJGPP
> verision).  The reason I wanted to use MGL is because it is supposedly
> availabel for both DOS and Win platforms.  I have had no luck get the
> latest version (4.05) to work with DJGPP however, so I decided to
> purchase the latest version of Watcom C (I don't like Microsoft
> compilers).  I've since read on the SciTech MGL newserver that MGL is
> not fulling working with DJ and the GUI library that goes along with it
> (Mvis) is currently entirely incompatible.   I'm just looking for
> comments/opinions/suggestions regarding advantadges of various
> compilers/libraries including DJ, Watcom, Allegro, MGL etc... aside from
> the obvious one: cost.  Thanks much for your comments,
>         Christopher

I've got both compilers and work with both, there are pros and cons to
both, as a base rule I'd suggest using as many compilers as possible
to make sure sources can be compiled with any compiler, e.g. portability
(I'm also using metrowerks, gcc (unix) and lcc for example)

Anyway some of the cons and pro's I encountered between watcom and
djgpp are ;

- Watcom is a lot faster in compiling than djgpp (compile time)
- Djgpp is somewhat faster as far as code generation (runtime)
- Watcom has horrible diagnostic detection 
  (one can write faulty code and watcom won't tell you while
  djgpp will on most cases)
  even worse watcom claims to be ANSI (ISO) C compliant but it
  just isn't (even with the appropriate switches)

- Watcom sometimes (on very few cases) generates invalid 
  invalid code with it's win32 compiler (it inserted a
  wait instruction once where it shouldn't have with the
  result of a page fault)

- Watcom's C++ support sucks.

So what I mostly do is compile my stuff with watcom just to see
if it's working (simply because it compiles all my sources quite
fast) and when it comes to debugging or runtime compilation I
use djgpp.

Two other possibly interesting compilers for you to check out
would be lcc (win32) wich is quite nice (fast & fairly reliable)
and MetroWerks (win32) wich is also quite solid (expensive but even 
faster at compile time than watcom, but has some serious problems
with optimizition switches).

Cheers, flux.