DOS ain't dead

public domain C compiler for i386 (Developers)

posted by kerravon , Ligao, Free World North, 22.05.2026, 11:14

Robert Pengelly has written a C compiler for the 80386
and released the code to the public domain. It's available here:

git clone https://git.candlhat.org/scc.git

It is written in C.

It is called both xcc and scc

xcc.exe as a Windows executable (308k) can be obtained from the
PDOS/386 disk at https://pdos.org/pdos.zip
(mount the vhd on Windows)
The makefile I use is \devel\pdos\pdpclib\makefile.xcc
pdmake -f makefile.xcc
read makefile.xcc to see the prereq

I also have a makefile.xcp for a static Windows executable (doesn't
use msvcrt.dll)

All this means that you can do Win32 development using only public
domain tools. The entire toolchain is public domain with C90 source code.

I consider Win32 to be a valid "DOS" format, using the HX extender,
and I leave it at that. But other "DOS" formats can likely be supported,
but you'll presumably need to do some work to get a suitable C library.

Note that xcc is having issues at the moment running on PDOS/386 itself.
That needs to be debugged in due course. (this is hot off the press)

I haven't tried running under DOS + HX yet either.

I don't know what the limits of the compiler are. It may be fully C90
compliant. It accepted all of my C90 code in PDPCLIB.

The compiler is 43,000 lines of code. 16 C files in a single directory.
No subdirectories.

It would be good if people could help lock down this compiler while we
still have an author willing to fix bugs for free.

BFN. Paul.

Complete thread:

• public domain C compiler for i386 - kerravon, 22.05.2026, 11:14 (Developers)
  • public domain C compiler for i386 - Rugxulo, 31.05.2026, 17:29
    • public domain C compiler for i386 - kerravon, 02.06.2026, 06:28
      • public domain C compiler for i386 - kerravon, 02.06.2026, 20:25
        • public domain C compiler for i386 - kerravon, 03.06.2026, 23:01