Date: Wed, 13 Jul 1994 16:13:40 -0400 (EDT)
From: Edwin Phillips <flaregun AT strauss DOT udel DOT edu>
Subject: Suggestions
To: DJGPP mailing list <djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu>


On Wed, 13 Jul 1994, Christoph Kukulies wrote:

> My suggestion:
> The further development of DJGPP should aim on making gcc available
> for WIN3.x, NT and Chicago (WIN32(s)) and making it possible to link to the
> WIN API libraries, either by supplying a compatible linker or by other
> means like converting tools for the MS object/library formats.

  This sounds like a lot of work ;)  It would be nice to be able to write 
a DJGPP/Windows program, but I don't like Windows programs.  There long 
and messy and have a lot of "char far *"'s and "LPSTR" and that 
nonsense.  That's why I quit Borland and switched to DJ!  If I want to 
malloc(1M), I'll do it, and set a "char *" to point to it and use it!  
One thing that _would_ be nice is an API that _uses_ the Windows calls, 
but provides a simple programming interface.  Like what libsx does for Xt 
and Xaw.

> 
> Also supplying good, fast, native implementations of the unix shell and
> text utilities is a task to be solved. starting ls in a dos box and
> waiting two to four seconds until the dpmi memory is allocated (these
> 2MB or something) is not fun.
> 

  I'm all for this!  I hate not having a egrep or sed or awk.  I know that 
they all exist (somewhere), but they should be made part of the 
binutils (contributed).  All we need is to get sources and build them 
using DJGPP, and put them in.  Then we know that they work with the DJGPP 
distribution, gcc, make, etc.

  I'd even be willing to try and find time to give it a shot.  As a 
matter of fact I'm looking for "less", to port to the RS6K, which would 
be a good opportunity to just go ahead and build it for DJ as well.

  There has also been a lot of talk about recursive make's and memory 
woes.  I like the idea of modifying make to not spawn() itself, just 
saving what it's doing and "starting over".  Has anyone determined if 
this is feasible?

  Has anyone got a good "sh"-like interpreter that we could port for 
DJGPP?  Might be a good COMMAND.COM replacement (avoidance) to use while 
developing and compiling.  Or all the time for that matter.  This would 
cost some precious memory, of course.

	Ed

/****************************************************************************/
/* Ed Phillips  flaregun AT strauss DOT udel DOT edu      University of Delaware       */
/* Jr Systems Programmer  (302) 831-6082    IT/Network and Systems Services */
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