1. Thinking of dropping Watcom support in 4.1.x, your thoughts?
- Posted by jeremy (admin) Sep 03, 2011
- 2499 views
Hello,
We would like input on what everyone thinks about dropping Watcom support in OpenEuphoria. The reasons for doing so would be:
- MinGW/GCC on Windows has reached a mature state
- MinGW/GCC on Windows now produces faster binaries than Watcom on Windows
- Watcom has no plans of ever supporting a 64bit environment, MinGW/GCC already does and Euphoria 4.1 supports 64bit when available
- Reduced mainteance overhead, the developers currently have to test in both MinGW/GCC and Watcom on Windows and make necessary adjustments to make certain portions of Euphoria work on both. Removing it would allow us to focus on other things that matter more (my opinion).
- GCC is the compiler that all other platforms use.
The reasons for not dropping it:
- Users may already have Watcom installed and do not wish to install MinGW/GCC.
There may be other reasons for keeping Watcom. Please add your thoughts. At this point in time it is a discussion only. There have been no decisions or plans made.
Jeremy
2. Re: Thinking of dropping Watcom support in 4.1.x, your thoughts?
- Posted by Vinoba Sep 03, 2011
- 2483 views
"MinGW/GCC on Windows has reached a mature state" - Great
"MinGW/GCC on Windows now produces faster binaries than Watcom on Windows" - Absolutely right
" Watcom has no plans of ever supporting a 64bit environment, MinGW/GCC already does and Euphoria 4.1 supports 64bit when available" - I remember trying to stick with 16 bit and suffering. I don't want that process repeated. I am on 32 bit WinXP now with 64 bit Win XP on the same drive in another partition. I have 32 Bit Win 7 in another drive with the 64 bit version on another partition. I have Linux on one drive under Windows 32 and I have two bootable CDs one with one version another with another version of Linux. I am all set for the transition, and only waiting for my old head to understand the various configs.
"Reduced maintenance overhead, the developers currently have to test in both MinGW/GCC and Watcom on Windows and make necessary adjustments to make certain portions of Euphoria work on both. Removing it would allow us to focus on other things that matter more (my opinion)." - Less work for the developers, the better.
"GCC is the compiler that all other platforms use." - Absolutely true. I use Harbour (free xBase compiler) and they went through the decision making (BCC vs. MinGW/GCC) and have dropped BCC in their latest version 3.0 as of last month.
"The reasons for not dropping it:
Users may already have Watcom installed and do not wish to install MinGW/GCC." - It is not a big deal installing both. I have both installed in my computer, plus BCC, plus Pelles, plus Digital Mars compiler.
"There may be other reasons for keeping Watcom. Please add your thoughts. At this point in time it is a discussion only. There have been no decisions or plans made." - Early decision would help you all (developers) and also the users.
Vinoba
3. Re: Thinking of dropping Watcom support in 4.1.x, your thoughts?
- Posted by ne1uno Sep 03, 2011
- 2516 views
We would like input on what everyone thinks about dropping Watcom support in OpenEuphoria. [...] There may be other reasons for keeping Watcom.
one minor difference, minGW built binaries/translated programs can not be UPX'ed (compressed). this may be fixed in a future version of UPX or fixable with an option to gcc, I don't know. this can make for a much faster startup depending on the storage medium/speed.
another difference is although 3 or 4 times larger distribution, open watcom does include an IDE, a debugger, help files, examples. for gcc these are available, but from all over the map in quality/usability. no idea how much the watcom tools are used either. not much by me.
there are several competing gcc 64bit windows compiler packages. there may be a good reason to choose one or the other to bundle. one difference is the type of debug info included in a debug build.
I've used the gcc windows port since the beginning. except for the minor inconvenience of not being able to UPX the executables I could enjoy saving some time not also doing a watcom built & test.
there are still some minor bugs in the minGW build/test/doc processes. no doubt quickly fixed as more people begin to report on them.
4. Re: Thinking of dropping Watcom support in 4.1.x, your thoughts?
- Posted by kenneth Sep 06, 2011
- 2365 views
OK by me. Windowers who have not yet used MinGw will find it awkward - hard to find the correct installation file - funny extensions on libraries - funny way of listing libraries on the command line - need to explicitly name the .exe file - making .coff resource files.
Digital Mars C is also up to date and gives a more "Borland Like" experience. Two files, dmc.zip and bup.zip, need to be unzipped and you are ready to go (the latter contains the resource compiler).
I have a soft spot in my cpu for the "Wat" family of languages - Waterloo Fortran was my first programming language - but Watcom C still doesn't implement a lot of C99 and it doesn't seem to be catching up (perhaps too much interest in C++).
5. Re: Thinking of dropping Watcom support in 4.1.x, your thoughts?
- Posted by ChrisB (moderator) Sep 07, 2011
- 2347 views
Hi
I rarely compile, so I have no issue with that. However, I would like to see close integration with eu, as Watcom is now, so that MinGW is distributed with EU in a ready to install / use format.
Does the lack of ability to upx a MinGW compiled program extend to a bound eu program?
Chris
6. Re: Thinking of dropping Watcom support in 4.1.x, your thoughts?
- Posted by mattlewis (admin) Sep 07, 2011
- 2406 views
Does the lack of ability to upx a MinGW compiled program extend to a bound eu program?
MinGW binaries have been supported since UPX 3.06 (released about a year ago). 3.07 is the latest. Changelog:
7. Re: Thinking of dropping Watcom support in 4.1.x, your thoughts?
- Posted by krg Sep 24, 2011
- 2142 views
Excellent idea. I have used mingw for about 8 years and it works great. Besides 64-bit support (which I know of, but don't use), mingw also has a decent C99 compiler.
However, mingw's header support for Windows always lags the current Windows SDK, and there are even some older header files which are either partially implemented or not at all. However, if Euphoria has no dependencies on these platform-specific headers, then there should be no problems.
Another minor plus for mingw (at least against Borland, not sure about Watcom) is that the stripped binaries it produces are smaller because of the dynamic linking to MSVCRT.DLL, instead of its own C runtime.
8. Re: Thinking of dropping Watcom support in 4.1.x, your thoughts?
- Posted by jeremy (admin) Oct 03, 2011
- 2032 views
In regards to this (and a HD failure) I created a video of me installing a development environment using MinGW for Euphoria.
Oh, this is for Windows and MinGW.
Now, I've learned a bit about doing screen casts and this one has a major flaw. Things are too small. In order to make sense of it you will have to view in HD and full screen. It should work just fine. If I make future Euphoria screen casts, I'll correct this problem. Sorry about that!
Jeremy
9. Re: Thinking of dropping Watcom support in 4.1.x, your thoughts?
- Posted by Vinoba Oct 03, 2011
- 1972 views
Looks good.
It would be good to slow it down a bit - about 30%, even if it means two youtube clips
If verbal instructions are added instead of music, it would be excellent.
10. Re: Thinking of dropping Watcom support in 4.1.x, your thoughts?
- Posted by jeremy (admin) Oct 03, 2011
- 1993 views
Looks good.
It would be good to slow it down a bit - about 30%, even if it means two youtube clips
If verbal instructions are added instead of music, it would be excellent.
I'll keep those in mind w/any future ones I create. Thanks for the feedback!
Jeremy
11. Re: Thinking of dropping Watcom support in 4.1.x, your thoughts?
- Posted by alanjohnoxley Oct 03, 2011
- 1966 views
Thanks again Jeremy,
I followed your video instructions and then did a
euc -gcc mycode.exw
and it worked first time, no warnings or errors :)
Very cool, and it compiled faster then Watcom too.
