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32-bit MSDOS (Announce)

posted by marcov, 01.07.2021, 15:54

> What is required to get Pascal to work? Starting
> with println('hello, world')
> or whatever it is in Pascal.
Well, the easiest would be to use the 16-bit compiler and run it under your 16-bit OS. (Or use some antique compiler version that generates binaries that run under your win32 emulation, but more on windows later)

You need to port the runtime, but that is pretty trivial. You can also do away with the 1MB copying and adjust to your calls.

The problems are in
- the linker. There is an internal one for go32v2 target. djgpp ld is also possible. On go32v2, the compiler directly generates coff .o and .a's.
- exception support. I guess for go32v2 it is SJLJ, so no problem.
- stack checking
- startup code is OS specific and must be created/ported.
- uses two handful of djgpp/extender symbols for things like ctrl-c trapping.

All will require some time. If there are problems with the linkers, those are probably the most complicated.

>
> You don't have a Win32 target already for your
> Pascal compiler/programs?
Yes, it is called "Free Pascal" btw, and its IDE is called Lazarus(-IDE), following the Delphi mould. Includes gadgets like resource compilers and even a CHM helpfile compiler.

But win32 is not a retro target, and thus officially only supports still supported Windows versions (win8+), with vista and w7 in a kind of grace period. (compatibility issues are fixed when reported in release candidates). I got report that most basic functionality however still works on w2000 and XP, including the 3Mloc IDE.

Since 2015 it switched to mostly use -W functions and thus dropped win9x compatibility, since 2020 it uses SEH for exception handling.

In total there are 5 windows targets

- 16-bit Win3.x
- win32, see above
- win64(x86_64 and experimental ARM64, e.g. RPI4), shares 99.9% RTL with win32.
- NativeNT(going to ntdll, used for device drivers and other NT system applets)
- wince (i386 and ARM), in decline.

The compiler also had its "hello world" moment on Itanium, and then x86_64 happened :-) The core missing active one is WinRT, the Windows "apps" format.

There are several dos targets too in varying degrees of decomposition:
- the main 32-bit target go32v2, based on the go32 V2 extender that DJGPP also uses.
- the main 16-bit dos target "msdos" (with 6 memory models). Newly released in 2020:-P !!
- OS/2 EMX, somewhat deprecated after the native OS/2 target emerged.
- watcom extender worked for a while too.

> I may well be able to support it, but it would
> seem strange to do so when you can produce a
> Win32 executable that runs, or can run, on
> almost every single computer and OS since
> around 1990.
The advantage of the old dos extenders is that they are fairly static, while most windows compilers slowly modernize as Windows moves on. E.g. using unicode functions.

> Linux has Wine. Freedos/MSDOS has HX.

And wdosx.

> PDOS/386
> has it. Even Microsoft support it. Can't remember
> the name of their shitty product. Something-11
> I think I heard. :-)
ReactOS :-)

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