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32-bit MSDOS (Announce)

posted by marcov, 01.07.2021, 09:45

> I don't know any of those terms, but GCCWIN is
> a 3 MB executable and hardly "trivial". It's
> 400,000 lines of C code.
But most don't touch OS.

> > Of course since TLS is related to threading it might be less relevant on
> a
> > single threaded OS like dos. But the subset of Windows binaries (even
> > commandline) that will run decreases because of it.
>
> My focus is on getting C90-compliant programs
> to work. The onus is on applications to be
> written in such a way that in an environment
> that doesn't support threading, the code base
> produces a sensible executable.
Count me out then, I'm not interested in C programming, except for when I absolutely can't avoid it in embedded situations.

The compiler I'm working on is not C nor one its derivatives (C++/D), but firmly in the Wirthian realm.

> But access to what segments? I only have one
> usable selector and the segment registers are
> already set correctly. If any DPMI application
> intends to inspect or modify those, it isn't
> going to work. ie DOS32A won't work when it
> starts looking at ES expecting a parameter
> there.
As said most assume an Unix model where ds=es.

Other selectors are sometimes used to map in the 16-bit dos 1MB and even rare for the VESA 2.0 linear framebuffer.

> So with 2 out of the 3 above things being doable,
> does that enable anything existing to run?
No, but it could be fairly trivial. E.g. for go32v2 (*) memory buffers have to be transfer from 32-bit space to 16-bit space before calling an integer, e.g. a filename or filebuffer.

But still, it requires modification, maintaining an extra target etc etc. The question is why would anybody. But I already asked that in a different post.

(*) The extender that DJGPP but also FPC or Free Basic uses. Afaik this one has been the choice of most for the last decade, but I might be mistaken. It would make sense to focus on that first.

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