>For one reason, DMC will not be released under GPL

How that buttresses Christof's assertions (about the OpenWatcom labor pool) escapes me.  Besides, if Christof is right, then you are happy, because the numbers will be small.

>It's been tried, twice now. They both failed likely because of my management skills.

Then take the full-open route.  Open-sourcing DMC requires nothing of you, not even CVS.  You just tarball the source, put a license on it, and announce "here it is, no support, sorry."  If someone wants to port to Linux, they will.  If no one does, we are no worse off.  Presumably the source code is commented.  As for compiler expertise there is more than enough of that in the Linux world.

>It took me a year to get all the
>licenses in order to launch Digital Mars.

Including the IDE, debugger, Windows header files, and Microsoft issues.  The Linux port needs none of that.  Just a console C++ compiler.  Much of that code you have written since the acquisition anyway.

Oh well I give up now.  The strange thing about this conversation is the 100% level of user interest in Linux coupled with a 100% bizarre opposition to all practical suggestions towards achieving it.  It's a crying shame, because the opportunity is so ripe.

Mark

"Nic Tiger" <nictiger@progtech.ru> schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:av7791$qa0$1@digitaldaemon.com...

> According to my experience you should teach your co-workers before you can
> give them some work to do.
> Since I think none of us has experience in writing optimizing C/C++
> compilers, it would be rather difficult for Walter to share tasks with us.
>
> But on the other side, I really can help in developing/maintaining such things as utilities (sc, smake and so on) and run-time library.

Hi, exactly. Who said that the most hard parts should be out-sourced? IMO Walter should look at all the little time killers that need to be done. I'm sure a lot can be out-sourced to some people here. Walter, you could start with easy things and see how it works out.

> I think we could help Walter in doing such helper things, while he will develop compiler himself. I think he will do this best alone than in a
group
> of co-workers who still have to be taught at least the basic things about writing compilers.

Well, managing tools, runtime library etc. could be done. Building up a validation suite etc. would help too. I'm not sure if it's necessary that others need to go to bare metal of compiler writing...

And Walter, if you think that your management skills are not appropriate to handle this. Why not let someone do it? Keep a single point of contact to this person, which is the switchboard to the rest of the people. I don't expect a 10+ team here. So management would rather be easy. I think my management skills are much better than my pure compiler writing skills. Robert

"Nic Tiger" <nictiger@progtech.ru> wrote in message news:av7791$qa0$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> According to my experience you should teach your co-workers before you can
> give them some work to do.
> Since I think none of us has experience in writing optimizing C/C++
> compilers, it would be rather difficult for Walter to share tasks with us.
>
> But on the other side, I really can help in developing/maintaining such things as utilities (sc, smake and so on) and run-time library.
>
> I think we could help Walter in doing such helper things, while he will develop compiler himself. I think he will do this best alone than in a
group
> of co-workers who still have to be taught at least the basic things about writing compilers.
>
> And I don't think that opening the sources will cure the problem. I think only Walter can understand them in reasonable time.

What has been an enormous help to me is Christof's (and others') help in getting STLport to work. It enables me to focus on the compiler rather than the morass that is STL. Boiling complex programs down to simple test cases is a bit of an art, and Christof is a master at it.


> P.S. I really want Linux port of DMC, mainly because of gcc's terrible inline assembler. I use inline assembler a lot and don't want to learn
some
> arbitrary "universal" assembler which gcc suggests instead of well known Intel assembler style. I want to port part of my software to Linux and
want
> to use my favorite compiler - DMC.

My brain hurts every time I try to use gcc's inline asm because the operands are backwards. Remember that old documentary about the guy who wore special goggles that turn the world upside down? After two weeks of that, his brain rewired itself so it was right side up again. Then, he took the goggles off. The documentary ended with a warning not to try that.

That's what I feel like using gcc's asm <g>.

"Robert M. Münch" <robert.muench@robertmuench.de> wrote in message news:av94n3$1rsp$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> "Nic Tiger" <nictiger@progtech.ru> schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:av7791$qa0$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>
> > According to my experience you should teach your co-workers before you
can
> > give them some work to do.
> > Since I think none of us has experience in writing optimizing C/C++
> > compilers, it would be rather difficult for Walter to share tasks with
us.
> >
> > But on the other side, I really can help in developing/maintaining such things as utilities (sc, smake and so on) and run-time library.
>
> Hi, exactly. Who said that the most hard parts should be out-sourced? IMO Walter should look at all the little time killers that need to be done.
I'm
> sure a lot can be out-sourced to some people here. Walter, you could start with easy things and see how it works out.
>
> > I think we could help Walter in doing such helper things, while he will develop compiler himself. I think he will do this best alone than in a
> group
> > of co-workers who still have to be taught at least the basic things
about
> > writing compilers.
>
> Well, managing tools, runtime library etc. could be done. Building up a validation suite etc. would help too. I'm not sure if it's necessary that others need to go to bare metal of compiler writing...
>
> And Walter, if you think that your management skills are not appropriate
to
> handle this. Why not let someone do it? Keep a single point of contact to this person, which is the switchboard to the rest of the people. I don't expect a 10+ team here. So management would rather be easy. I think my management skills are much better than my pure compiler writing skills. Robert

I'd really like someone who was willing to manage a project to see DMD through to a linux version. It's a project worthy of anyone's management skills <g>.

A good friend & colleague is working on the IDDE, but since he's unpaid, priority has to go to projects that pay the bills. I'm open to suggestion for anyone who wants to work on improving any of the rtl or ancilliary tools. A worthwhile project would be to convert all the library asm to using the compiler inline assembler as much as possible (most of it was written long before the compiler had a decent inline asm).

Other things that will help a lot is just taking opportunities as they present themselves to spread the word about DMC/DMD, by posting about it, linking to it from web pages, asking people who release source libraries to support DMC, etc.

I can perform your task: convert ASM modules into inline-ASM in run-time library.

But I'm curious what is the purpose?
To eliminate need of masm? Or what?
I doubt about converting c0 modules, it seems to me not possible.

Nic Tiger.

"Walter" <walter@digitalmars.com> ÓÏÏÂÝÉÌ/ÓÏÏÂÝÉÌÁ × ÎÏ×ÏÓÔÑÈ ÓÌÅÄÕÀÝÅÅ: news:avb524$2sku$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>
> "Robert M. Münch" <robert.muench@robertmuench.de> wrote in message news:av94n3$1rsp$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> > "Nic Tiger" <nictiger@progtech.ru> schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:av7791$qa0$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> >
> > > According to my experience you should teach your co-workers before you
> can
> > > give them some work to do.
> > > Since I think none of us has experience in writing optimizing C/C++
> > > compilers, it would be rather difficult for Walter to share tasks with
> us.
> > >
> > > But on the other side, I really can help in developing/maintaining
such
> > > things as utilities (sc, smake and so on) and run-time library.
> >
> > Hi, exactly. Who said that the most hard parts should be out-sourced?
IMO
> > Walter should look at all the little time killers that need to be done.
> I'm
> > sure a lot can be out-sourced to some people here. Walter, you could
start
> > with easy things and see how it works out.
> >
> > > I think we could help Walter in doing such helper things, while he
will
> > > develop compiler himself. I think he will do this best alone than in a
> > group
> > > of co-workers who still have to be taught at least the basic things
> about
> > > writing compilers.
> >
> > Well, managing tools, runtime library etc. could be done. Building up a validation suite etc. would help too. I'm not sure if it's necessary
that
> > others need to go to bare metal of compiler writing...
> >
> > And Walter, if you think that your management skills are not appropriate
> to
> > handle this. Why not let someone do it? Keep a single point of contact
to
> > this person, which is the switchboard to the rest of the people. I don't expect a 10+ team here. So management would rather be easy. I think my management skills are much better than my pure compiler writing skills. Robert
>
> I'd really like someone who was willing to manage a project to see DMD through to a linux version. It's a project worthy of anyone's management skills <g>.
>
> A good friend & colleague is working on the IDDE, but since he's unpaid, priority has to go to projects that pay the bills. I'm open to suggestion for anyone who wants to work on improving any of the rtl or ancilliary tools. A worthwhile project would be to convert all the library asm to
using
> the compiler inline assembler as much as possible (most of it was written long before the compiler had a decent inline asm).
>
> Other things that will help a lot is just taking opportunities as they present themselves to spread the word about DMC/DMD, by posting about it, linking to it from web pages, asking people who release source libraries
to
> support DMC, etc.
>
>

"Walter" <walter@digitalmars.com> wrote in message news:avb4f4$2s2r$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>
> "Nic Tiger" <nictiger@progtech.ru> wrote in message news:av7791$qa0$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> > According to my experience you should teach your co-workers before you
can
> > give them some work to do.
> > Since I think none of us has experience in writing optimizing C/C++
> > compilers, it would be rather difficult for Walter to share tasks with
us.
> >
> > But on the other side, I really can help in developing/maintaining such things as utilities (sc, smake and so on) and run-time library.
> >
> > I think we could help Walter in doing such helper things, while he will develop compiler himself. I think he will do this best alone than in a
> group
> > of co-workers who still have to be taught at least the basic things
about
> > writing compilers.
> >
> > And I don't think that opening the sources will cure the problem. I
think
> > only Walter can understand them in reasonable time.
>
> What has been an enormous help to me is Christof's (and others') help in getting STLport to work. It enables me to focus on the compiler rather
than
> the morass that is STL. Boiling complex programs down to simple test cases is a bit of an art, and Christof is a master at it.
>
>
> > P.S. I really want Linux port of DMC, mainly because of gcc's terrible inline assembler. I use inline assembler a lot and don't want to learn
> some
> > arbitrary "universal" assembler which gcc suggests instead of well known Intel assembler style. I want to port part of my software to Linux and
> want
> > to use my favorite compiler - DMC.
>
> My brain hurts every time I try to use gcc's inline asm because the
operands
> are backwards. Remember that old documentary about the guy who wore
special
> goggles that turn the world upside down? After two weeks of that, his
brain
> rewired itself so it was right side up again. Then, he took the goggles
off.
> The documentary ended with a warning not to try that.
>
> That's what I feel like using gcc's asm <g>.
>

My opinion is: when I program PDP-11 family processors, I certainly will use 'MOV src, dest', but when I program Intel family processors I want use 'MOV dest, src' and not opposite.

Since assembler is not portable by definition, I don't want any generalized form of it, I rather make different files and write different asm for different machines (processors) than make myself think in terms of 'generalized assembler'.

So, I'm waiting for normal Intel assembler under Linux, like I have in DMC for DOSX and Win32.

Nic Tiger.

> I'd really like someone who was willing to manage a project to see DMD through to a linux version. It's a project worthy of anyone's management skills <g>.

Well, I have put up the website for that at http://www.opend.org/
It there a link from http://www.digitalmars.com/ to it??? I have not checked in
a long time to be honest as I have been burried with financial burden and really
have to focus on making money and keep the server and newsgroups going.

> A good friend & colleague is working on the IDDE, but since he's unpaid, priority has to go to projects that pay the bills.

I recognize that... I have done quite some work on the IDDE code as well and do not think I am far away from having it decently fire up and actually getting it back in shape, but hey... The person working on in now has it name written all over the thing if I remember correctly.

> I'm open to suggestion for anyone who wants to work on improving any of the
> rtl or ancilliary
> tools. A worthwhile project would be to convert all the library asm to using
> the compiler inline assembler as much as possible (most of it was written long
> before the compiler had a decent inline asm).

That should be relatively easy to do...
I think a good way to start with that would be to add all the RTL code to CVS as
that enabled more than one person to work on the stuff at the same time. I have
put the D front into CVS on opend.org, but have not seen many actually access
the CVS. Of course I do not give unsupervised write permission... Same should be
done for RTL and other ancilliary tools source.

Also... I do have a version of IMPLIB that makes creating the system .LIB files from the system .DLL a little easier. It uses the compiler front end to parse the headerfiles and extract the function declarations. It uses an .INI file to define the stack sizes of the parameters and generates a .LIB with the proper @n decoration where possible.

> Other things that will help a lot is just taking opportunities as they present themselves to spread the word about DMC/DMD, by posting about it, linking to it from web pages, asking people who release source libraries to support DMC, etc.

Have done that where ever I could I think...
Support for it on other sites would be great though.
For one I have patched Codejock's Xtreme Toolkit so that it compiles with DMC++.

Jan

>A good friend & colleague is working on the IDDE

Developing an IDE for Linux is wasted energy.  There are good Linux IDEs already.  It would be best to focus on the compiler itself, and let people integrate DMC with Eclipse, XEmacs, whatever.

Besides, if you are going to port the IDE, you should port it to a cross-platform toolkit like wxWindows so you don't have to maintain two bodies of source code.

There are plenty of Intel assemblers for Linux.  NASM comes to mind. http://sourceforge.net/projects/nasm http://home.attbi.com/~fbkotler/

There are also cross-assemblers for PowerPC.  A little digging should turn them
up.
http://www.penguinppc.org/

Mark

Mark Evans wrote:

> >A good friend & colleague is working on the IDDE
>
> Developing an IDE for Linux is wasted energy.  There are good Linux IDEs already.  It would be best to focus on the compiler itself, and let people integrate DMC with Eclipse, XEmacs, whatever.

I do not think the IDDE is going to be ported to Linux.. This is the original Win32 IDDE that needs some smacking around before it recompiles and actually loads again.

> Besides, if you are going to port the IDE, you should port it to a cross-platform toolkit like wxWindows so you don't have to maintain two bodies of source code.

wxWindows or Qt or...

So far parts are written with just and only flat windows API. Other parts are written on MFC 3.20 (I think).

It basically is a LOT of sources in different styles that are hooked together
someway. Without too much documentation.... <g>
I have spend quite some time on it, but have not gotten to the point where I could
actually recompile it and use it. However, the person that currently works on it I
think was on the original development team and should make better progress in less
time than I did in basically foreign code as I call it.

Jan

>wxWindows or Qt or...

...Eclipse.  The days of custom IDEs are numbered.  The effort going into the Symantec IDE -- even on Windows -- would probably be better spent integrating with Eclipse.  An Eclipse plugin suite would be portable to all platforms, Win/Linux/Mac.  So you would kill three birds with one stone.

Eclipse already has the C/C++ editing and project management stuff, necessary hooks for ISV debuggers, breakpoints in the C/C++ source, compilers, etc. Essentially it takes care of everything so that you can concentrate on core functionality. http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-API%20use/eclipse-api-usage-rules.html

Based on your description of the Symantec IDE code I would say it's time for clean start anyway, even on Windows.

Best regards,
Mark