[vbox-dev] Unhappy with recent developments

[Michael Thayer]

Hello Pau,

On 26/11/12 22:24, Pau Garcia i Quiles wrote:
> I'm curious, why move from bcc (ancient, unmaintained for ages) to
> Watcom (which looked to me barely maintained and developed) instead of
> something more modern like gcc, clang, etc? I guess Watcom has some
> unique features that make it more fit for BIOS' compilation, but other
> than having read Watcom was used in the past for embedded because it
> generated small code, I cannot think of anything.
>
> (and please let's not make this a licenses, freedom, etc discussion: I'm
> asking a purely technical question)
To cut a long story short, Watcom was the free-est compiler available 
which could generate decent 16-bit x86 code.  bcc was always rather 
painful to use due to it's very limited support of 16-bit Intel memory 
models, and eventually the pain got too much.

Regards,

Michael
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