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Open Watcom 1.0 Released
Posted by
michael
on Sat Feb 08, 2003 02:46 PM
from the competition-is-good dept.
from the competition-is-good dept.
JoshRendlesham writes "The Open Watcom C/C++ and FORTRAN 1.0 compilers have been officially released. The source, and binaries for Win32 and OS/2 systems, are available. This release also means that outside developers can join and contribute to the project." Or if you prefer, gcc is up to 3.2.2.
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Rise of the Triads (Score:3, Interesting)
Open C-64 0.9 is now available. (Score:1)
DOS days (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.ps2emu.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday July 05 2003, @05:18PM)
graspee
Re:DOS days (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, I'm excited by this because, well, competition is almost always a good thing. Hopefully gcc and Watcom can feed off each other and both products will improve. And perhaps more importantly for the build-everything users, another open source compiler might start moving people (like the developers of autoconf) to better support non-gcc compilers. This way, users who prefer Watcom's (or Intel's, or...) compiler can use it without as much tweaking.
Re:DOS days (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.ps2emu.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday July 05 2003, @05:18PM)
graspee
Re:DOS days (Score:5, Informative)
(http://q-m.org/)
Good old days (Score:1, Interesting)
What happened to Watcom (Score:5, Informative)
IIRC: Watcom was purchased by Powersoft. Powersoft's main product was a front-end database tool called PowerBuilder. One of Watcom's products was a small database called Watcom SQL. Powersoft bought Watcom so that they could ship Watcom SQL along with Powerbuilder, so that Powerbuilder could run OOTB.
Oddly enough, Sybase bought Powersoft a few years later so that they could use Powerbuilder to compete against Oracle's front-end tools. This meant Sybase ended up with Watcom's assets, even though they were not particularly interested in them.
cool ! that's great news (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://zataka.com/)
Hopefully this sets a trend.
Re:cool ! that's great news (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.animats.com)
Incidentally, if someone can tell me how to prevent loader crashes in "ld" under QNX when there's an undefined symbol in a trivial program that includes "", I'd appreciate it. Nobody in the QNX newsgroups seems to know.
Just don't... (Score:2, Informative)
(http://world.guns.ru/main-e.htm | Last Journal: Friday March 05 2004, @07:28PM)
Watcom was great. How about today? (Score:5, Interesting)
I received the email yesterday about Watcom's "release" to open source. In that email it says that Sybase felt there was no commercial value in the product anymore so they released it. My question is "Has Sybase been keeping this thing up? Is it useful today?" Or is this a scam to try to give life to a dying patient? I mean perhaps people working on this might be better off working on gcc or something.
Thanks!
Re:Watcom was great. How about today? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Friday October 24 2003, @04:10AM)
One thing I know is that their optimization routine rocks.
Well, optimization routines can be divided into two parts: One is architecture independent (which involves simplification of AST and stuff) and the other is architecture independent. IIRC, their architecture-independent optimization was really great. It can correctly detect redundant codes and simplify it.
I used to be an ASM programmer as I was a performance freak. When I compile my C/C++ program using Watcom, it almost always produced near optimized (i.e. the "gold-standard") asm code. I knew this when I dumped out the assembler code.
I knew that their arch-independent optimization is really good because when you add things such as calculation of busy expression (i.e. expression that you used over and over) and stuff, it correctly cache the calculation before hand. So, you will save a tremendous time, especially if you do it in a loop. The problem was (again, IIRC) that was not perfect and some of the expressions are left undetected. But, that's probably a bug.
IMHO, arch-independent optimization play a lot greater role than the arch-dependent one (ok, some of you may not agree with me). Things like peephole optimization is great, but is of limited usefulness once you apply the correct transformation of the AST and other internal structures.
This is also partly why Intel optimizing compiler is also great. I heard that some of the folks are doing partial evaluation on the code -- which can greatly help speeding up the result. The idea was: If you use a particular routine (like function) only with a handful of value range, it will automatically create a specialized and optimized function for you exploiting the nature of the input values. For example: You probably have seen the routine that calculates (-1)^n used in a routine that calculates x^y. The optimizing compiler thus should be able to generate: return (n && 1 == 0) ? 1 : -1; instead of the looping. This only involves some (expensive) static analyses computations. I have yet to see this in other compilers.
Therefore, this release is really really good thing. I hope that GNU compiler teams would pickup some of their good stuff.
Superb! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Superb! (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.grub.net/blog/index.html | Last Journal: Wednesday June 27, @08:48AM)
It's no coincidence that SGI and Cray have excellent Fortran compilers, their customers demand it.
(sorry I spent all of last Wednesday in 2 seminars with a fellow from SGI's Canadian HPC group, I'm still buzzing.
GCC performance and another thing... (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://hatemytory.com/)
2. Does the Watcom WIN32 binary run under WINE?
Re:GCC performance and another thing... (Score:5, Informative)
Which to use; WatCom or GNU (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Sunday March 16 2003, @10:39PM)
Performance comparisons (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.cleanstick.org/)
Win32 compilers (not including Watcom - and with good reason, it's a bitch to set up on Win32) [willus.com]
as linked from the djgpp FAQ, some info on DOS compilers [geocities.com].
So, hooray! A lesson in using Google before Slashdot mixed with some blatant karma-whoring.
PS. this [bagley.org] is good too.
No Time (Score:4, Funny)
Who is using Watcom in production? (Score:3, Interesting)
This would also be excellent information for Watcom to put on their site. It would give them much more legitimacy.
i have been waiting for this news (Score:1, Informative)
Mainframe compilers (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/h390-vm/)
WX-REXX (Score:1)
Warp speed - I never really got there, but I sur tried!
Free software not a dumping ground! (Score:1, Insightful)
(http://br.geocities.com./lgcdutra/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 07 2004, @05:34AM)
Yet another company trying to use free software as a dumping ground for useless software. What does Watcom have to offer today? Which vision of the future they have that could offer something that gcc or something the like cannot?
I do not see anything they can offer. Even if they had, would it not be better to just release the source code under the GNU GPL and integrate any valuable part into gcc? Thus they could create a new Cygnus based on their gained gcc expertise. But we do not need yet another also-ran, GPL-incompatible, redundant confused-ideas licensed open-source piece software.
Perhaps some years ago this would have been great. Not it is too little, too late.
Re:Free software not a dumping ground! (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Sure it is (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.castlesteelstone.us/ | Last Journal: Friday June 30 2006, @01:35AM)
Maybe you're not up to snuff on the philosiphy of code-reuse and what Free Software means.
If software and code is a commodity, and the value then becomes it configuration/customization, then every little bit of trash that can be opened is a Very Good Thing. If the company was proprietary their entire corporate life, but releases the soruce as GPL (or BSD) when they fold, this is a Good Act and should be Lauded and Welcomed and Thanked.
The darn site's
GCC (Score:5, Informative)
Gcc is good, open, and could use some work, so please think about helping out. My favorite is MinGW [mingw.org] which is a really nice and decently maintained Win32 version of gcc and binutils. MinGW also distributes MSYS [mingw.org] which is a bash shell and other gnu utilities that make a windows box capable of running a Linux configure script. This allows much easier porting of GNU applications to windows and vice versa. There are several GUI compilers based on MinGW too, see the web page FAQ. A nice GUI GCC based compiler for Win32 is Bloodshed Dev-C++ [bloodshed.net], which I've used.
Cygwin [cygwin.com] is good too but I prefer MinGW (obviously).
So think about helping out, our tools will only get better if folks work on them.
Watcom Memories (Score:3, Insightful)
What killed them? Did they pull all their brains off C++ to work on PB? Was competition from MS too tough? Was their GUI builder (licensed from some 3rd party) too lame? Was the cost of implementing the C++ standard too high? (Watcom was late to offer STL -- they included their own (way different) libs instead.)
We were a couple of generations back on chips when Watcom pretty much stopped pushing their compiler technologies. I wonder how much they lose by not having optimizations targetting new hardware features.
Re:Watcom Memories (Score:5, Informative)
Watcom would have to eliminate all the support for the other platforms to license MFC and ship it with their compilers. And Microsoft was all but giving Visual C-- away at the time also.
The Watcom compiler was one of the fastest on the market from what I remember. I had heard that IBM used it for the WinOS/2 subsystem on OS/2 to make it a faster Windows than Dos/Windows.
Think about it, Microsoft HATES anything that abstracts the Win32 API and crossplatform frameworks and crossplatform compilers where one of the early targets of the beast in Redmond. Borland was the only one that got any money out of taking Microsoft to court for attacking it's business using illegal means. The others were too small and just folded and looked for other ways to make a business.
LoB
Now all we need.. (Score:2)
It's been a long time since I've used the Watcom compiler, but it used to be the bomb. I use gcc exclusivly now, and sometimes pine for the day when a build was done in seconds instead of minutes. I'm betting it will be a difficult undertaking to incorprate the Watcom code, though.
No, actually (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday January 06 2003, @10:36PM)
Incidentally, vectorization in Intel C/C++ is a joke. I put so many hints into my code (aligned variables, processed stuff in suitable sized chunks etc.) and still couldn't trigger the compiler to vectorize. It's much easier to insert SSE instructions yourself.
The Intel compiler has better error reporting than MSVC++. I use it when I don't understand why MSVC++ is barfing on my template code. This is more useful than it sounds!
Cross compiler for PIC microcontrollers? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.golden-dumpling.org/)
The more compilers the better. (Score:3, Interesting)
VC++ is okay, beware that the cheap/free edition leaves out the optimizations. The standard library is much improved in the 7.0 release, but MS still like to disable some default warnings to paper over their own historical sins to keep things like MFC happy. The IDE is pretty nice and the documentation for the standard library is usually damn good, but I will never forgive Visual Studio's authors for the way they chose to dedent the case clauses in switch blocks.
g++ is finally a nice compiler in its 3.x incarnation. In the 2.9x days it was utter trash. The generated code is good and usually quite fast, but a bit on the bloated side. It is a little more permissive than I'd like even with -Wall -pedantic, but that's okay since it's not the only compiler out there. This is a good choice for producing final executables.
The verdict is still out on Watcom. Bundling STLport already puts it a step ahead of most, that thing can be a bitch and a half to get working with some of the commercial compilers.
Long File Names Support (Score:5, Interesting)
The long file name support is broken everywhere in this new release of Watcom C/C++/Fortran77. Even the included IDE doesn't do long file names. So you can imagine my disappointment when I opened C:\Program Files\watcom\\hello.c and hello.cpp in the IDE, only to get a blank file named "C:\program".
This is 2003 and Windows 95 didn't just come out last month. I mean, Sybase told us on June 30, 1999 that v11.0 would be the last major release of Watcom C, and long file names worked just fine there. Reincarnated as open source now without LFN support, does this mean that this feature got left behind in the afterlife?
It would be nice if... (Score:1)
Wonderful, but... (Score:1)
why Microsoft doesn't one-up Sun and release large
portions of it's J++ product that it was supposedly planning to discontinue anyway.
will all open source compilers grow together? (Score:2)
So if the same open source developers work on both Watcom compilers and GNU compilers, does this mean that the best features of both will be carried back and forth (kind of unknowingly, but more out of convenience) until they start looking alike? I would assume that in the future these products may grow together, and the same destiny may apply to other open source efforts that have commonalities.
Watcom is ok. (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Sunday November 04, @03:38AM)
Re:Stop duplication of effort (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://zataka.com/)
I'm looking forward to someone benchmarking gcc vs watcom to see how they do.
Re:Stop duplication of effort (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stop duplication of effort (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.outshine.com/)
Yeah. That whole "competition" thing is totally overrated.
Re:Hey, let's include a snide comment! (Score:1)
Not really because no one really cares about anything micheal says anyway.
Sometimes I wonder if he actually enjoys looking like an idiot.... hmmm....
Re:I liked the old commercial versions (Score:1)
Re:Hey, let's include a snide comment! (Score:1)
(http://www.nevdull.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday April 29 2004, @08:58PM)