Subj : Compilers/systems
To   : Vitaliy Aksyonov
From : andrew clarke
Date : Tue Feb 07 2023 03:41 pm

On 2023-02-06 21:10:08, Vitaliy Aksyonov (1:104/117) wrote to All:

 VA> I want to do some code refactoring to remove dangerous coding
 VA> approaches. Like memset() instead of new(), printf(), etc.

 VA> Which compilers are still in use to build GoldED+ and for which systems?

If you're taking over development then it's really up to you what you want to support.

Linux, FreeBSD or MacOS users will have modern versions of GCC and Clang available.

Ideally the Windows version should be built with a version of MSVC that has full STL support. This would exclude now-ancient MSVC versions like Visual Studio 6.0 from 1998.

From memory the very recent versions of MSVC no longer produce binaries that will run under Windows XP. I've found a good "middle ground" is something like Visual Studio 2012, which still runs well under Windows 10 & 11.

OTOH it would be preferable if a free compiler could be used in Windows. Recently I learned that in 2020 Embarcadero released a fork of Dev-C++ that provides GCC 9.2 and supports C++11:

https://github.com/Embarcadero/Dev-Cpp/releases

OS/2 I'm not really sure about, but I know there are modern versions of GCC available from the Netlabs repos.

I was going to suggest DOS/DPMI support should be dropped, but I see GCC 10.2.0 was ported to DJGPP in 2020, so that's probably useable. Though I doubt many people would complain if DOS support was removed from future GoldED versions.

Another option for Windows, OS/2 & DOS may be to build with a recent version of OpenWatcom 2.0, though I don't know how well it supports STL or C++11. It may be good enough.
The great thing about OpenWatcom 2.0 is can run under Linux, and it's also a cross-compiler, so you can build DOS, Windows & OS/2 apps from Linux.

--- GoldED+/BSD 1.1.5-b20220504
 * Origin: Blizzard of Ozz, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (3:633/267)

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