noshutdown wrote:

i also found that they are both very hdd consuming. openwatcom takes ~100mb without any ide, and newest djgpp with gcc8.20 takes ~200mb, while older gcc4.9.4 takes ~120mb. which is a pain in the ass as i have only 2*500mb hdds on that 386 and i still need to contain windows95, office97, 3dstudio, quake...

Well, those were times that you had to actually choose what to install, and why things like Windows and Office had so many setup options to choose particular components...

For showing how tough life was, there sure is a lot of nit-picking.

So then a good question for the OP (or anyone looking into this for their own purposes) is whether it's more important to use a compiler that pushes the hardware to the performance limit or tools representative of what would be used at the time.

BloodyCactus wrote:

I have on my machine Watcom 10.6, 11 (pre opensource version with all the stuff), OWC2.0. If you go back, 10.6 doesnt have things like stdint+inttypes, which make life much harder (portability wise).

OWC2.0 is only 100mb if you add all the extra stuff, if you install only the dos headers/libs/binaries, it should be way way smaller like 30mb or something.

(I also have on my box quick c, turbo c, turbo c++, bc3.1, and a bunch of other compilers for interest sake).

i rechecked my openwatcom1.9 and found it takes ~60mb if i don't install the sample files, or 15mb less if i give up the help files. but it comes without ide and i don't know what to use.
djgpp with older gcc3.4.6 also takes ~60mb including rhide and the infamous allegro library, so that makes things more acceptable.

noshutdown wrote:

i rechecked my openwatcom1.9 and found it takes ~60mb if i don't install the sample files, or 15mb less if i give up the help files. but it comes without ide and i don't know what to use.

It comes with an IDE for 16-bit and 32-bit Windows.
The DOS version comes with vi.

Scali wrote:

It comes with an IDE for 16-bit and 32-bit Windows.
The DOS version comes with vi.

ah, didn't notice there is vi. but still its an editor rather than an ide, so its not remotely as convenient as the ancient borlandc and quickbasic.

The vi fans will beg to differ. 😀

I learned on Turbo C 2.0 and then switched to djgpp and emacs as well as gdb. I even used a Hercules card for gdb so I could debug VGA mode X programs.

Have you considered going the cross-compiling route and using DJGPP with a modern IDE in a newer OS?

On GitHub I found build-djgpp, a script that downloads, builds and installs DJGPP as a cross-compiler on modern operating systems (Windows, macOS and Linux). It takes a lot of the tedious stuff out of your hands!

As for what IDE to use, personally I like the IDEs by JetBrains, having used IntelliJ IDEA a lot at work over the years. So I decided to try getting a DJGPP cross-compiler to work with CLion, a C/C++ IDE from the same company that uses the same IDE engine and supports many of the same plugins.

After I had installed DJGPP as a cross-compiler on my Linux environment, I managed to configure it as a project compiler in CLion and I was successful in compiling and building some example code with it and then running the resulting EXE in DOSBox. 😀

The JetBrains IDEs are highly regarded, with good refactoring tools and other modern IDE features, as well as a rich selection of available plugins.

Two things to keep in mind, though:

* Unlike IntelliJ IDEA, CLion does not have an open source "community" edition and therefore requires a paid license.
* CLion currently only supports the CMake build system. If you're intending on working on existing DOS DJGPP projects, they probably use a build (make) system other than CMake and those are usually not easy to convert, especially in more complex projects. Something to keep in mind.

Of course once you have installed DJGPP as a cross-compiler, you should also be able to get it working on other modern C/C++ IDEs, many of which are open source:

* Eclipse
* Netbeans
* Visual Studio Code (not to be confused with regular Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code is free, cross-platform and open source)

I haven't tried DJGPP with any IDE other than CLion yet, though. I'm curious about the experience of others here.

Some people here might consider the luxury of a modern IDE on a modern operating system "cheating" when doing DOS development, but all these modern IDE features do help in taking much of the most tedious and least fun parts of programming out of our hands, so why not? At least that's how I see it. To each their own. 😀

The only IDE for me is KDE's source editor, Kate. <3 I haven't found ANY other editor that behaves more intuitively for me (wrt indents, tab/space handling, folding, etc.) It's just sympatico.

I'm building a 386 dev box where I'll use MS C, MASM, and Watcom, but I suspect most of my coding will be done on my Linux boxen / VMs, and compiled / tested in DOSBox before moving to real hardware. Writing code in 80x25 or 640x480? No thanks.

vvbee wrote:

For showing how tough life was, there sure is a lot of nit-picking.

How else are you going to build character?

Gene Wirchenko wrote:

vvbee wrote:

For showing how tough life was, there sure is a lot of nit-picking.

How else are you going to build character?

Building character is easy...

tar xvzf character.tgz
./configure
make
make install

See, told you it wasn't hard 😀

SirNickity wrote:

Writing code in 80x25 or 640x480? No thanks.

80x25? 80x50 for the win! I do all my DOS coding this way. Yes, in 2019 this is probably masochistic. But after writing code at the day job on a high-res multi-monitor setup, coming back to the simplicity of DOS text modes is strangely satisfying to me. 😀 *shrug*