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Smaller C compiler (tests under emulation) (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 10.05.2015, 04:46

> > What's the problem with .BATs? Too tedious? Anyways, I'm starting
> > to wonder if makefiles (e.g. 16-bit port of Dmake) would be better
> > (for testing).
>
> .BATs are a bit too primitive to my taste and insufficiently standardized/
> widespread. I wouldn't be able to use them under Linux, for example.
> They'd have to be confined to DOS/Windows environment. Makefiles aren't
> the best either. There are different makes and Windows doesn't provide
> make out of the box.
Then use pre-existing portable tools like GNU Make or OpenWatcom Wmake(r) or Dmake.

> The kinds of bugs I've found in OW (and heard others stumble upon)
> suggest that testing in OW is rather poor if existent at all. The OW's
> very own website says that 3rd party commercial tests were lost in
> transition of the project to open source. They couldn't be open sourced.
Maybe so, I don't know. I'd be surprised if they didn't glean a lot from other sources, esp. GCC. Dunno what tests they use currently. But be sure to try again with the latest unofficial build from a month ago.

> > > > Did any of this help? I feel like I just mostly rambled (again,
> sigh).
> > >
> > > Not really/not yet. :)
> >
> > I honestly don't know what you're trying to do here.
>
> What do you mean by that?
I thought you wanted help with running tests under emulators and extracting files from images. I don't know what else would apply here.

> > The problem with FASM (for 16-bit DOS target) is lack of OMF/OBJ
> support.
>
> It is a problem to a degree. OMF/OBJ itself is a huge problem. It's an
> overly complicated format that pretty much nobody implemented properly.
> We may talk about conspiracy theories behind different OMF/OBJ tools
> being incompatible with one another, but it's a too big and too quirky
> thing to deal with.
A few years ago, I already experienced a lot of that trying to use ancient Oberon-M 1.2 for DOS. We had a long thread about it here. That (freeware) compiler is very old (1991), back when DOS still came with LINK. Obviously various vendor extensions and adding 32-bit support threw a lot of wrenches into everything. I had to do a tiny hack myself to the resulting (main) .OBJ just to get it to work. Japheth did kindly patch JWlink for me. I tested a bunch of linkers: some worked, some didn't. It's definitely complicated. So I don't really blame you for using something else entirely.

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