Interresting development with open watcom

[revelator]

Seems like someone took up on updating the open watcom source (no news since 2010 on the official site) but a git user has made a fork that builds with msvc and has preliminary support for 64 bit compiling

Im ironing out a few buggers it had with msvc2012 but it seems to Work.
Should be good news if he continues the Work while one off the older compilers it beats pretty much all off the Commercial compilers when it comes to optimization.

[revelator]

Done a full build and so far i was able to build it, many warnings though (code still needs a massive overhaul to support 64 bit integers correctly).
The wiv editor crashes at exit but seems to Work ok, the compiler itself creates 32 bit executables since Theres no 64 bit api yet and the 32 bit builds created with it Work just fine.
Ill point him to my own patchset for the full build might Spur some interrest from other devs.

[leileilol]

Does it compile stuff made for DJGPP too?

[revelator]

if the makefiles are modified for watcom i believe it would it comes with a complete dos api.

[leileilol]

Can you get to compile in it?

[revelator]

Havent tried but ill give it a go im not very comfortable with the dos api though :S

Im about to upload the builds for those Who want to experiment with it.

Watcoms ide is very minimal so you might consider using codeblocks instead, it does support multi compilation though so you can build a ton of Projects at once.

The 64 bit binaries are in a seperate folder named binnt64.zip and while the compilers themself Work ok, some of the gui tools are a bit crash prone so use with that in mind (still experimental).

I also ported the free gdiplus api from mingw to watcom and added glut + glaux to the opengl apis.

Full build was done with msvc 2012 not watcom and there are setup packages for dos / os2 / Linux and nt.

If someone finds Watcoms STL lacking then i have my own port of StlPort 5.0 which Works very well with it (only for NT though).

Link comming soon.

[revelator]

uploaded

had a look at the qip code and might be possible if i can figure out watcoms flags for Building dos executables on Windows.

[revelator]

Uploaded My own build environment for open-watcom.

Includes Euphoria which is a script based programming language like python/perl but is about 30 times faster. It can also make native programs from your scripts and was compiled with mingw/open watcom.

My Open Watcom build environment includes a few Things not in the standard build.

SDL.
GLUT.
GLAUX.
GLFW.
PNG.
TIFF.
JPEG.
BZ2.
ZLIB.
UNIICOWS.
GDIPLUS.

Tools.
Nasm.
Yasm.
JWasm.

STL.
StlPort.

The Euphoria.exe in the root folder is a console Shell for portable Development (was copied of my Work with mingw).

[revelator]

New builds uploaded.

Installer for the 64 bit version now working.
Removed gdiplus Again because of some missing exports, it will go back in when i get it fixed.
Lots of fixes and my bug report is now rolled into trunk so it builds fine with msvc 2012.

OW's w32 api reported complete but is a bit lobotomized, no backwards support.
If compiling for directx its reccomended to use the DXSDK from MS as watcoms version is very minimal.

STLPort dropped because of problems with errno collisions.

I did keep support for glaux and glut though glaux is deprecated it Works fine with OW and glut Works fine to.

TODO.

wxwidgets support is a Little shoddy, odbc is not supported at all due to missing exports and types in OW's odbc (lobotomized sigh).
opengl support also has export problems but should be fixable.

rest seems to build fine.

[revelator]

Open Watcom could use someone with C++ knowledge to help finish there version of the C++ standards library.

Its about 50% done sadly the project lacks developers so it wont be finished any time soon unless someone chimes in

I have helped squash as many bugs as my limited understanding allowed me to, but i only recently started dabbling in C++ so i cannot help them in that regard.
If anyone here can im sure they would appreciate the help though .

As for benefits Open watcom is a multiplatform compiler that allows making programs for several operating systems on one platform (you can make Linux executables on say Windows and vice versa).

OS support includes Linux / QNX / OS/2 / dos / Windows 9x - NT / AXP NT atm.

The C compiler is mostly complete and most of the bugs i helped squash was in the w32api.

The C++ compiler is working but because the STL still needs a lot of Work not everything builds with it yet, i did manage to compile most of wxwidgets with it though so its atleast in a usable state.

If you want to help Development you can make commits to

[revelator]

Latest beta has tons of fixes, help menu fully working again (has been broken for years)
More fixes to the C headers.
Math functions added to the STL.
64 bit binaries now pretty stable (also the gui based ones).

Jiri is pushing out daily updates so a lot going on behind the scenes
A few others have chimed in with patches for the STL.

Compiler now in a pretty usable state, messages still a bit nerdy but are slowly getting changed to something human readable (msvc syntax).

Should try it out and report bugs we need those to fix stuff.

[revelator]

I havent been updating this regularily because of to much work + health problems, but the latest builds are up again.

While still lacking a bit in the standard library department, the compiler works really well now.

For whats there in it its extremely well coded and should be a monument to how things should be done ,
just sad that development takes so long but understandable with only a few dev's working on it.

Modern code will probably not compile with it yet atleast from experience you cannot compile say the latest wxwidgets version with open-watcom (missing functions), the older 2.12 version works though. Also SDL OpenAL and most image libraries are buildable.

qbism super8 can also be built with it Qip needs some changes because it used djgpp for the dos parts but should also be compilable with open-watcom as it has full support for building for DOS (even from windows NT). It even comes with its own extenders in case those are needed.

[frag.machine]

[revelator]

Hehe yeah it seems rather odd in these days but some people hold onto dos for old school gaming

Btw it can also make executables for OS/2 which has a better DOS than DOS but with a real desktop OS/2 still exists but has changed name to ecomstation.
While not known as a gamer OS it does run old 8 and 16 bit games far better as long as they are opengl, it also has an emulator for running windows programs
like wine does on linux but on OS/2 its called Odin.

[frag.machine]