Interresting development with open watcom

[revelator]

Hehe nice

Ah i remember those days, but you had to make a few changes in the bios to run OS/2 as it would in most cases not boot if you did not (something about 64k bios memory if i remember correctly).

Been a while since i toyed with it.

[frag.machine]

From what I remember I never had to tweak BIOS to be able to run OS/2, but there was an issue about a 286-specific instruction required by the OS/2 kernel and unavailable in 386 or higher processors, and IIRC some BIOS provided the required emulation by enabling an advanced setting. More info on the problem can be found .

Yeah it's been a very long time since I stopped using it as my primary desktop OS (DOS-based Windows was too unstable and inefficient and I was never been a Linux desktop fan TBH), but it was a great 4-year run. I managed to skip the whole Windows 95/98/Me mess but ended switching to Windows 2000, XP and now sticking to Windows 7 Enterprise. I still miss the Workplace Shell.

But back to the thread topic my first contact with Watcom 10.6 was exactly when I was trying to write code to OS/2. It was a very impressive cross-platform compiler, and the generated code had usually superior performance compared to the other options such MSVC6 and gcc.

[revelator]

For my part it was the first compiler i used when i started dabbling in C many many years ago.
It had some outstanding optimization options for the time but was rather strict so many things that compiled with msvc caused the watcom compiler to choke.
So it forced you to do it right or not at all, sadly my skills at the time were not the best so many times i had to give up on a project because i simply couldnt get it to build with it.

Its still strict but not as much as it was in earlier versions (could simply be that i got better also),
and you can use msvc libraries with it directly something that not even mingw64 can do yet without having to resort to making new import libraries.
These days i use it for cross building stuff for msvc.

I still got my CD's with watcom 10.6 and the later 11.0 version though i don't use them anymore because of problems building newer sources, i keep them around in case i need to compile some old stuff.

Heres the latest build https://sourceforge.net/projects/cbadva ... 9-02-2016/

It was bootstrapped with the intel compiler