Monthly Archives: July 2020
OpenWatcom: Fixing a Compiler Bug
Here I go through the story of finding a bug in a compiler, building, and fixing it. It’s a story of dealing with an unfamiliar build system and unfamiliar code base. Not all the details of the false starts and mistakes follow, but enough of them to show how one can use basic tools to figure out how an unfamiliar system works.
Why OpenWatcom? I first came across OpenWatcom when I started being interested in programming for OS/2. This was in 2006 or so. At the time, and still I believe, OpenWatcom was the only current compiler that made native OS/2 binaries. GCC compiled code requires a Posix runtime environment, either the old EMX, or the newer klibc1.
I’ve also used OpenWatcom for DOS development. I am interested in retro programming, and at the time (in the 90s) I just wasn’t good enough to do what I wanted to do; so I’ve let my teenage dreams come true in recent years. Mostly I run my DOS applications in DOSBox, and I run my compiler in the same system I use to run DOSBox, such as ArcaOS and Windows. OpenWatcom is famous for being the compiler of choice for most of the big name DOS games such as Doom and Tomb Raider; see the list of software made with the Watcom compilers.
Even though OpenWatcom only makes 32bit binaries, I’ve also used this occasionally for Windows programming. I don’t remember where and when, but I came across Structured Exception Handling in the context of Windows programming, and one day I wanted to give it a try; this time I chose OpenWatcom rather than Visual Studio.
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