Date: Tue, 6 May 1997 08:52:12 -0400 (EDT)
From: Pierre Phaneuf <pp AT 55-174 DOT hy DOT cgocable DOT ca>
Reply-To: pierre AT tycho DOT com
To: OpenDOS Mailing List <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
cc: OpenDOS Developer Mailing List <opendos-developer AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: Re: OpenDOS Kernel sources finally! :)
In-Reply-To: <199705060826.KAA22478@grendel.sylaba.poznan.pl>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.95.970506083936.19030B-100000@55-174.hy.cgocable.ca>
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On Tue, 6 May 1997, Mark Habersack wrote:

> DJGPP + NASM would be better. I assume you think about Linux 16-bit A86 AT&T 
> assembler? Well, it's not documented at all and most DOS users don't know 
> anything about AT&T assembler syntax (although it's better than Intel's IMHO)
> And compiling the sources under DJGPP is not a problem at all. The problem is 
> to *port* the operating system to the 32-bit world. You cannot just recompile 
> COMMAND.COM and several other utilities under DJGPP and expect it to work. 
> COMMAND.COM uses dozens of hacks to talk to the DOS kernel, hacks which 
> wouldn't work from 32-bits. The same applies to the kernel - have you seen 
> the sources? If you have, then you know what I'm talking about.

DJGPP + NASM (or GAS or whatever) would do very well for 32-bit code, but
as DJGPP cannot do 16-bit real-mode, we've got to find a free C compiler
for DOS for OpenDOS/16! I didn't check LCC more when I saw that it was
32-bit itself. We need a compiler that runs on less than 386.

Micro-C anyone? It's going to be for porting from ASM anyway...

Pierre Phaneuf