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FPC for DOS / FreeDOS (DOSX)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 11.04.2008, 15:50

> (snip freedos development model summary)
>
> Yes, I know all that. But I was not talking about the core FreeDOS
> programmer, but rather the community at large.
It is a very very fractured community, they are not organized. They are split in a million pieces, and they don't all stay up-to-date. (It's a big, big world.)

> Btw, there was a Microsoft Pascal, but the last version is from the
> eighties. (Windows 1.0 is rumoured to have been in Pascal, though it is
> hard to separate real facts from assumptions that result from of stdcall
> being a pascal like calling convention)
I know, but it wasn't / isn't free and didn't come with DOS by default (although QBASIC did). And FreeBASIC has tons and tons of old QB users.

> - The later 1.0.x versions were pretty decent,

Better than 2.0.4? More stable?? (Laaca, any comments?) That would be hard to believe, but I have heard rumors. So what has been the most stable DOS version, anyways, 1.0.10?? (Ignoring IDE and debugging but re: actual compiling.)

> IMHO in all other things FPC is better. The most crucial one being that
> FPC (and maybe GPC) are the only ones with any future at all.

Yes, obviously, and that is due to being GPL. (But of course C/C++ is king, for good or bad.)

> >(Although I still say any asm code he has might potentially be useful,
> but whatever
>
> The trouble is that he had to do the hard work for your "potential" use.
> And that potential was considered negiable by all that have seen the
> source.
FASM is fully written in ASM, and it has many users. One guy even got it targeting ARM! And it (now) runs on about 9 (or 10?) OSes natively. So I would consider that a success. And the forum is quite active. It doesn't mean that its author gets tons of patches from users, but they do use it. So assembly is not dead, and certainly people still use it. It's not as impossible to understand as some people pretend (at least, not at the bare instruction level ... other stuff may be a bit more complex).

But I can definitely understand that some things take too much time, are too complex, etc. Plus, motivation is a rare thing, and it's hard to make yourself do things sometimes. :-(

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