DOS ain't dead

Compiler Source: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Compiler
Linker Source: https://github.com/DigitalMars/optlink

Binaries: https://github.com/DigitalMars/dmc

> Compiler Source: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Compiler
> Linker Source: https://github.com/DigitalMars/optlink
>
> Binaries: https://github.com/DigitalMars/dmc

Thanks. Liked it a lot, so it is a good move from Walter to not let it die.
If someone is not aware of its history: http://www.javiergutierrezchamorro.com/historia-de...lightzortechzorlandsymantecdigital-mars-cc/2472

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Visit my personal blog at http://www.javiergutierrezchamorro.com

> Compiler Source: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Compiler
> Linker Source: https://github.com/DigitalMars/optlink
>
> Binaries: https://github.com/DigitalMars/dmc

and Walter's statement:
https://www.mail-archive.com/freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg11672.html

Since we got a bit distracted in the other thread, I'll mention it here:

>> Speaking of programming, apparently D and Modula-2 are still trying to get
>> integrated into GCC proper eventually.
>
> Still no life in GPC. Lessons from the past

First of all, I have no idea about GPC. They seemed to give up after 4.2.x backend work in 2011. And not many people still care about ISO "standards" in Pascal, apparently. So FPC may be non-standard (though obviously mostly supports ISO 7185 by now), but it's extremely good. Any portability concerns with FPC are still less than with any other Pascals. "Standard" code that runs nowhere else isn't very useful. (Oberon, while nice overall, is worse in that regard.)

For the others, GNU Cauldron 2018 has some videos, including some stuff about C++ modules (interesting, but I haven't watched yet) plus D and Modula-2. According to Phoronix, D has officially been integrated into GCC for upcoming version 9! Not sure about GM2, but even that seems extremely mature at this point, so I'd be surprised if it didn't get integrated later. (AFAIK, you were quite the aficionado of Modula-2 at one point.)

I don't know what this means for DJGPP. Probably nothing. I'm not sure if they will survive in the coming years or not. I'm grateful for what they've done, but I don't expect miracles.

Just general language comments ....

> And not many people still care about ISO "standards" in Pascal, apparently.

Pascal-p5c fully supports ISO 7185 (as a translator in/for GCC/Clang-extended C). Not sure if anyone will ever use this to bootstrap another ("extended"?) Pascal compiler from scratch, but it's definitely cool.

> "Standard" code that runs nowhere else isn't very useful.
> (Oberon, while nice overall, is worse in that regard.)

I still never learned (ANS?) Forth, but they're always obsessed with bootstrapping. I think there was an Oberon parser in GNU Forth (Gray??). Not sure if I consider that too minimal (low-level) or not.

Oberon-07 is still Wirth's latest, and it's supported by Oxford Oberon 3.x series compiler (which sadly doesn't support DOS anymore; no, I haven't tried cross-compiling it, written in OCaml). But even that is only receiving minimal updates these days. (Should still mostly work under HX, but I haven't tried lately.)

> For the others, GNU Cauldron 2018 has some videos, including some stuff about C++ modules

No joke, it's easy to be snarky (Modula-2 had it forty years ago), but C++20 will have coroutines and modules. So that's great news (not that I grok C++).

In other interesting news, seems NVIDIA has been working on Fortran compilers (atop LLVM, mostly for x64?). Specifically, one called Flang (Fortran 2003, written in C) and a newer one, f18 (written in C++17), that partially supports the latest standard (formerly called Fortran 2015) and OpenMP. I don't grok Fortran either (though my brother got me a discarded library book about F77 a few years ago, which I never read), but it's still vaguely interesting. Though 2003 (major revision) was way complicated, and 2018 added better C interoperability since many low-level libraries are still written in that.

What a messy world. And that's ignoring all the other up-and-coming, trendy, modern languages (Rust, Go, Julia, Swift, Kotlin).

Yeah, it's just strange (almost) looking at 2003, thinking of the computing landscape then (WinXP, 32-bit P4 single core, Delphi 7), and comparing to 2018. Not just hardware and software (compilers, languages) but everything overall (video game consoles, cell phones, televisions, whatever). "Best of times, worst of times."