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posted by marcov, 20.02.2012, 18:23

> > Nonsense. A simple compiler+linker is not rocket science, and can be
> easily
> > done by a handful of hobbyists. It won't be top of the bill performance,
> > but that doesn't really matter either.
>
> Define "simple". FALSE? PL/0? Oberon/0?
For any somewhat normal procedural or OOP language. You can try to find extreme cases of course, but that doesn't really say anything.


> > If you make the toolchain itself 32-bit (but targeting 16-bit), the
> > generated code might actually be quite decent since you don't have the
> same
> > memory and speed constraints the original 16-bit compiler developers
> had.
>
> No. 16-bit vs. 32-bit has nothing to do with speed or capabilities.

Please read the actual quote before replying. It was about development speed, not execution speed.

In other words, how much of a compiler can you whip up in a certain amount of time, if you can use a fairly modern 32/64-bit toolchain with linear memory, and don't care about speedy compilation on anything less than 1GHz.

> It's only code size and memory.
> 640 kb really should be enough to write a decent
> compiler.

It is not. Compilers have a relative heavy use of memory, and with global (whole program) optimization slowly becoming the norm, this gets only more important.

> Heck, Wirth's ARM compiler for 32-bit OberonSA (-07 variant?) is
> only 61 kb. Granted, I have no idea what form of linking or OS support is
> also needed.

Minimal language, minimal compiler. God knows how much effort. Irrelevant.

> But I heavily suspect a "decent" DOS compiler could easily fit
> in 200 kb or less. Well, there are many pre-existing that fit the bill and
> accomplished a lot, so I'm not exactly blindly guessing here.
I know. And from some I also know how much work it was.

> > It is not a niche problem. Amiga, C=64 and OS/2 communities do get
> things
> > done. Dos not.
>
> AROS lacks memory protection and can't run legacy apps since it's x86
> based. How is that better than DOS?

Who cares?

> C64 only has 64 kb of RAM. How is that
> better?

Again, who carez? THeir communities are vibrant and can keep up their belt, and actually get own hardware designs of the ground now and then (remember Pegasos?)

> There is no free/libre OS/2, how is that better?

Free/libre OS, and a community that can keep their own belt up, is something different. I was talking about the second, not the first.

> So FreeDOS trumps
> them all.

Well, I couldn't get 1.1 to install, so leave the trumps away ;-)
It couldn't find the cdrom it booted from :-)

> Besides, honestly, DOS is a family, not a single platform.

That is certainly one of the problems. But e.g. Amiga is also fragmented.

> But stuff still gets done. Granted, some people
> prefer newer things.

If it was, freedos would have superseded them all by now, based on an own dos-only toolchain.

> (BTW, speaking of that, shouldn't you be busy porting
> Lazarus to WinRT/Metro?

No. You still don't get the base premise of this subthread. One is supposed to develop for what you use. I don't have winrt, and don't plan to use winrt (IOW program for MS' app store), just as I don't program for Apple's.

> > Ask yourself why. Maybe because most of the remaining Dosers are there
> > mainly because of inertia, rather than choice.
>
> It's hardly inertia. Software isn't easy to rewrite.
Why does nearly every niche community then have more to show for it than Dos? Even though the total installed base and commercial relevance of Dos in its heyday was larger than of any of the others?

> It's not for nothing
> that GCC is still popular, it works (less than ideal, but it still works
> nonetheless). Similarly why 2012's x86 cpus still supports 1978's 8086
> instructions and real mode.
It's not about all others being perfect, it is about Dos not even being average.

> > And the smart shopping and patching goes on :-)
>
> Yes, I should just use FPC on everything 100% of the time.
Of course! Have I ever said anything else? :-D

> (BTW, wasn't
> there some unfinished work on an Oberon frontend in a forked FPC from
> somebody?? Well tell him to hurry up, heh.)
Not that I know. Afaik there is only the promise that I'll make a FPC based M2 compiler myself when I win the lottery :-)

As said in the other part of the thread, I never cared much for either M3 or Oberon. At least for normal usage, they might have been great experiments in the past.

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