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DOSes written in assembly (Developers)

posted by kerravon, Ligao, Free World North, 04.04.2024, 15:11

> Somewhere in 1985 I had to choose between Turbo Pascal and C as programming
> language. I chose for TP but sometimes I regret it, seeing how many
> programs and OSes are written in C. That Linux is written in C, is
> completely understandable, but a DOS, like FreeDOS, no.
Can you explain why it is not appropriate for FreeDOS to be written in C? I believe they advertise that anything that runs on MSDOS should run on FreeDOS too. Surely that is the ultimate arbiter of whether it is possible to do the job in C?

But I'm interested in what you perceive the technical reasons are.

Note that I'm familiar with the generated assembler from C compilers with optimization on and it looks perfectly fine to me.

> My question: are there other open source DOSes around, meant for 8088/8086
> computers and purely written in assembly?
I know of LK-DOS. I can contact the author to find out where it is currently if you are interested.

But I'm more interested in why you are choosing the 8088/8086 for a new OS.

If there is some 16-bit segmentation challenge, why not make it dual 8086/80286?

And what's the reason to not use the OS/2 1.x or MSDOS API? Is there something wrong with it? If so, can you elaborate?

Note that I'm not being sarcastic - this is my interest. OS philosophy or whatever you want to call it.

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