_1dt3k_

0 comments by _1dt3k_ on Nov 29th, 2011

Since I started my DunGen project I've been using the compiler Open Watcom. Just for a bit of background; The Watcom C compiler was about the only 32-bit C compiler in the mid 90's as a result many major companies and people from that classic era used Watcom C to build their projects such as 3D Realms with their classic BUILD Engine programmed by Ken Silverman, id software built DOOM for DOS with it, Interplay used it for the ever classic Fallout and finally Lucas Arts built Dark Forces with it.

These days however with Win32 ports of GCC and a version of MSVC availible for free it seems that the world has forgotten about Watcom, which was open sourced in the early 2000's and renamed to Open Watcom. I feel like this is a bit of a shame as the OW compiler has some of the best features and a simplistic interface that would please just about anyone that would use it I'm sure. As a result of the world's forgetfulness most of the really popular libraries and even more of the obscure libs tend to ignore OW and simply don't support it. There are a few exceptions to this like zlib and OpenAL but this is really not enough, in my opinion. So now that you, the reader, are aware of the compiler OW why not go check it out?

Openwatcom.org