Date: Wed, 2 Jun 93 09:34:26 EDT
From: DJ Delorie <dj AT ctron DOT com>
To: sandmann AT clio DOT rice DOT edu
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Re: DJGPP and Windows (fwd)


> > A question, though, to which the answer is almost certainly no, but which
> > can stand raising nonetheless: is it at least possible to write an
> > actual Windows GUI application with this version of DJGPP? (That is,
> > clearly no one has created libraries to explicitly support this, but
> > are there still major theoretical barriers to doing so?)

> Ah, the third time I have been asked this (item #1 for 1.11 FAQ).  I haven't
> looked enough at the mechanisms for launching Win applications to know how
> it works.  Are there any programs which run from a "DOS" window and bring
> up a Win display?  Or does Windows key off of a different EXE header format?
> In any case, nothing is impossible (GO32 under 0.9 shows that) it just takes
> lots of time to figure it out and write the libraries...

Windows looks for a magic cookie just after the .exe header to
determine that the app is a Windows app when you run it.  Also, the
Windows API relies on far pointers and DLLs, so any Windows
development kit for djgpp will be difficult to create or at least take
a lot of typing.  The current (1.10) Windows support is simply to
allow gcc and other go32 apps to run in the MS-DOS window.