open-watcom-v2 VS WSL

https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2

In terms of ISO-complianceness, perhaps don't expect much. It basically C89 (the C99 support is still incomplete), and for C++... most likely not even C++98 - compliant.

> You will also want to start with a 16-bit C compiler like Borland Turbo C or Microsoft C

The parent post mentioned they're going to use OpenWatcom which is an actively developed[0] C and C++ compiler that targets 16bit DOS (among others).

[0] https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2

Despite the lack of feature support, the compiler is still updated to this day, and still does support DOS, Windows, Linux, and OS/2, so it's modern in the sense of maintenance, just not really standards support. If you got further questions, I can send you the Discord link. They are pretty friendly.

My advice is, when you feel you need that challenge, install DOSBox or DOSBox-X and Open Watcom C/C++, DJGPP, or gcc-ia16 and do some retro-programming. You'll also get the fun of being able to do low-level hardware twiddling and rely on DOS being so simple that it's effectively an RTOS.

If you want to build under Linux, I would recommend you look at Open Watcom. It's the best open source 16-bit x86 C compiler, IMHO.

I have recently found out that Watcom C still exists. And not just exists, but there are plenty of commits.

I should note, that OpenWatcom 2.0[1] is far better for supporting more recent C and C++ code, modern hosts and tooling, but still able to compile into 16 bit code. It is also actively maintained. Instead of MASM I recommend JWasm[2] + Jwlink[3]. Back in time I did a fork[4] of JWasm that has cleaner build system (CMake).

[1] https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2

[2] https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/JWasm

[3] https://github.com/JWasm/JWlink

[4] https://github.com/JWasm/JWasm

If you want to run this in DOS: the code under src/should actually compile with this OpenWatcom fork via the -za99 flag. MiniFB however will not compile. You'd have to palettize the output pixel buffer to 256 colors and then blit it to 0xa000if you fancy that.

GCC, clang or maybe watcom? You wouldn't find it there (before invention of AGI, but that would be entirely different can of worms).

It absolutely 100% can be true.

As an example: Windows Services for Linux 2 used a special init daemon to interact with the host OS.

That meant no systemd. That meant that the `systemctl` program wasn't there.

This baffled legions, armies, of wannabe sysadmins.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55579342/why-systemd-is-...

https://superuser.com/questions/1785697/systemd-in-wsl-on-wi...

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/9477

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1132230/unable-to-run-any-sy...

People on the whole have no idea how this stuff works, and they just copy magic incantations from StackOverflow to get stuff to happen. If that doesn't work, then this OS is broken. The end.

For these guys, WSL was broken.

Result:

MS hired Lennart Poettering.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/07/lennart_poettering_re...

He "fixed" it. Systemd now works in WSL2. All those guides for noobs now work. Everyone is happy.

In a world where tools like Flatpak and Snap are proliferating and it's driving deep divisions between Linux distros, if you think the average person struggling with Linux is going to use `ldd` to work out where the dependencies for something live, I'm afraid you are a deep guru who lives on a different plane of existence.

We now have widely-used packaging systems which simply embed an apps entire dependency tree into a package to avoid people having to work out the difference between `apt` and `rpm`. Thousands of terabytes of disk are being burned to make this stuff go away.

Yes, this is too hard. Way too hard.

Better source: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...

One of the bugs where on the Docker side. As I have said, there have been several since release with a lot of impact period overlap. The latest and greatest is not resolved.

It's the issue of abysmal I/O performance in communication between the mounted WSL2 virtual hard disk and Windows mounts inside the WSL2 distro.

I found this github page and I was able to reproduce this from the answer

* Docker engine and not Docker Desktop in a VM. WSL2 works well after some configuration: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/6655#issuecomment-11...

Seems to more of a Defender issue than a WSL one, see https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8995

After adding exclusions for the fsnotifier-wsl process and and both variants of the WSL distro path my disk performance was improved.

Adding the idea64.exe process also helped since I was trying to run IntelliJ against projects inside WSL.