Talk:DJGPP

"claim is clearly untrue"

A recent edit by 46.7.136.7 has removed the mention of various popular programs compiled by DJGPP. That anonymous person said, "claim is clearly untrue in some particulars (in regards quake) and redundant otherwise. these programs 'may be' compiled with DJGPP, but they may be with many gcc based compilers. also, no reliable sources".

I'm not sure what the alleged problem is. First of all, yes, a few of them were third-party (unofficial) builds, but most were (or are even still) offered by the first-party developers themselves (whether they compiled it themselves or accepted contributions). And no, you cannot just compile anything with DJGPP. Only strictly conformant programs that don't make horrible assumptions will be implicitly portable. The rest have to be heavily massaged (aka, "ported") to the platform. So some of these have had extra work done just to function correctly. The ones that are (AFAIK) still officially maintained upstream for DJGPP are GNU Emacs, NASM, and UPX. Some of the others alas are abandoned, but for the record, things like Linley's Dungeon Crawl originally started with DJGPP.

I'm also not sure what "in regards quake" means. It's extremely obvious (as mentioned at http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/history.html) to anyone who looks that Quake 1 was a DJGPP v2 binary, as id was intentionally cross-compiling with a free compiler targeting DOS (and its subsystem under Win95). The idea was to facilitate mods, but that fell through. Nevertheless, you can still grab quake106.zip (shareware demo) if you don't believe me. Heck, the Quake article says this: "the original Quake had been written for DOS, allowing for launch from Windows 95, but could not run under Windows NT-based operating systems because it required direct access to hardware". Just for completeness, the RESOURCE.1 file (inside QUAKE106.ZIP) is an .LZH sfx archive, and inside it are several .EXE files, thus both CWSDPMI.EXE and QUAKE.EXE are DOS binaries (as reported by "file", although you can also run them to find out!). Armslurp (talk) 17:55, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

Memories, Fond and Otherwise

I recall a few interesting things about DJGPP -

• The first time you ported a program from Watcom to DJGPP you were astonished because:
  • You learned your code was rubbish because you (unknowingly) relied on Watcom to silently "repair" boo-boos.
  • Once you fixed your program it ran 10 times faster.
  • Zowie, look at all these free tools and libraries (Flex, Bison, Curses, Regex...)!
• You stopped using DJGPP because you installed LInux to compile Perl 5 using gcc as a cross-compiler targeting DOS (because it broke the 8.3 naming convention) and forgot all about DOS. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.215.115.31 (talk) 17:15, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Funny, but you forgot about DOSEMU or DOSLFN. Armslurp (talk) 17:55, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

DJ was awesome! Please unsigned, no tongue in cheek disparagement. He literally was the founder of Linux for Windows. SChalice 04:33, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

C99 Support

It's been a while since I used DJGPP and/or DOS, but I don't think C99 support is very complete, as C99 had just recently been released when the last DJGPP version came out. 91.40.106.254 (talk) 23:08, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

Are you talking about /current/ or /beta/ ? Which version of GCC? As far as the compiler itself, that totally depends on the version of GCC (e.g. 3.2.3). However, DJGPP doesn't use Glibc, so it's totally different. 2.03p2 lacked some things (e.g. snprintf), but 2.04 had it and others. Maybe not 100% compliant in library, but it's not true that there was no support. Armslurp (talk) 17:55, 13 June 2015 (UTC)