Hi!
Well, I summarize my first impressions with Watcom in (short) list:
______________O\_/_________________________________\_/O______________
OpenWatcom wishes, issues, troubles and bugs
--------------------------------------------
Distributive:
- no descriptions for archives and files in archives.
- no separate "Installation guide" and "Step by step examples how to use".
- no (separate) FAQs and HELP.ME.
Utilities:
- WHELP doesn't restores fonts at exit.
- WHELP doesn't lists help files (in current and/or startup directory).
- WHELP doesn't shows help file header (for example, "Open Watcom C/C++
Getting Started") in Contents.
- WHELP doesn't remembers last position in Contents.
- WHELP doesn't support fast search (by first typed letters).
- TECHINFO detects FPU presence without FPU (looks like in source
mistyped "> 1" instead ">> 1").
Command line:
- WCC and WPP are not equal in options (for example, WCC doesn't support
-ew and -oi+ options).
- with -eq option WCC/WPP doesn't show on screen errors, which not relate
for sources (for example, "wrong option").
- WCC/WPP aren't support -mt option (and, thus, TINY memory model).
- WCC/WPP/WCL doesn't support text file, which automatically searched in
current and else startup directory and then parsed before command line.
- WCL searches WCC/WPP/WLINK only in current directory and in PATH;
WLINK searches WLINK.LNK only in current directory and in PATH;
startup directory isn't searched.
- with option "@file" FILE is searched only in current directory (not
even in PATH).
- with "form dos com file ..." in command line (and without WLINK.LNK in
PATH) WLINK one time informs several times about "segment relocation",
then hangs with DOS4GW page fault; other time WLINK simply informs several
times "file not found", "undefined reference" and "undefined symbol".
Language:
- WPP doesn't support "int main" without "return 0;".
- startup supports (undocumented) _stacklen variable only for .COM files,
else there are no possibility to define stack size in source.
Code generator:
- WCC and WPP are different - sometime one is better, some other.
- WPP doesn't support merging string literals (-).
- WPP aligns CONST/CONST2 segments at byte, WCC at word (-);
WPP aligns _DATA/_BSS segments at para (-), WCC at word.
- WPP places static variables with explicit zero initialization into
_BSS, WCC into _DATA (-).
_____________________________________________________________________
O/~\ /~\O
OW also not very comfortable on low machines (all executables are big and
under dos extender, thus run slowly; though, work is stable), but beside
this, OW looks good: small working set (~13M for C/C++, ~14M for helps);
smart compiler (optimizer makes nice code).
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