Re: Open Call for DOS Developers
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Apr 17, 2013
- 6900 views
Hello
Years ago I published your "Open Call" at freedos.org mail lists.
Thank you again for doing that.
Rugxulo, one of the main Freedos developers show some interest on Eu for DOS,
It looks like that person was the rather irritating guy I talked to on IRC.
but there was a lot of problems with sources, was not possible to compile the last Eu for DOS.
If http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/mix_entry.php?id=9244 is accurate, then all the issues encountered were really trivial ones (configure.bat needs some fixes to run with command.com instead of cmd.exe, someone needs to provide pre-translated sources for a --without-euphoria DOS build, perhaps some minor makefile.wat changes to make sure we only build the docs and so on after we've built a new source binary, etc).
If someone sent me a copy of the list of build errors and errors running configure.bat on command.com, I could probably make the relevant changes myself. I wish that Rugxulo had returned to the IRC channel when these issues were encountered so I could help fix it, though I understand having a lack of spare time to dedicate to such an endeavour.
(As an aside, I always found it ironic that Shawn Pringle fought to keep DOS support in the end when he helped kill it in the first place (by breaking the build for DOS-only users when he rewrote the makefile to use exw.exe to build ex.exe,trying to solve a problem that I had already solved before).)
On the back burner, if there was no interest in reviving a full MSDOS port of Euphoria, I had on the back burner a plan to create a DJGPP only "UDOS" port, which would levage DJGPP's POSIX compatibility and provide limited to no support for the DOS specific stuff (graphics, allocate_low, dos_interrupt, etc), instead requiring users to write their own machine code and use call() to implement those features. I figure that this should require only minimal changes to current pre-4.1 sources.
The reason that we chose not to keep a build for DOS going was because the amount of code in Euphoria to support DOS, which was never used in any other platform, was extensive (Jeremy said it was a huge percentage of Euphoria's overall code line count at the time, he had a specific number but I can't recall what it was at the time). That was a huge amount of dead code to allow to bitrot. I guess we could have kept a minimalist infrastructure for DOS going though, stripping that out but leaving behind the #ifdefs so a DOS build would still be possible instead of removing everything.
Freedos continue as active project, they miss a good interpreted program...
Someone here claimed that we should drop DOS due to a lack of interest in it, but in the same thread, Arjay claims that there may not be enough interest in Euphoria to support a DOS port revival. (If the HX DOS Extender works for Cygwin's gcc, it'd probably just work for eui.exe as well.)
