Path: csiph.com!news.swapon.de!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Paul Edwards Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.programmer.misc Subject: Re: inoperative keyboard - analysis required Date: Sun, 3 Mar 2024 12:34:55 +0800 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 88 Message-ID: References: <_XtEN.164822$taff.123947@fx41.iad> <%MREN.454297$c3Ea.430095@fx10.iad> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Sun, 3 Mar 2024 04:35:00 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="c29a046a2bbd9abde8e9dd207421eafa"; logging-data="2462771"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+nq9HLUgIaZRAG378bBJ1/nWCyh7ghATU=" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; Warp 4.5; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.8.0 Cancel-Lock: sha1:4cDCJuF5OJyqA+XkUcLWCMh3KDY= X-Mozilla-News-Host: news://news.eternal-september.org In-Reply-To: <%MREN.454297$c3Ea.430095@fx10.iad> Xref: csiph.com comp.os.os2.programmer.misc:1892 On 03/03/24 11:04, Dave Yeo wrote: >> That's why I am interested in supported software >> (ArcaOS), and, if you want open source, then I have >> a simple system instead (PDOS/386 is pretty simple), >> that can actually be understood and maintained. > > Problem is software has gotten big. The browsers for example push the > limits on our 32 bit system. I've seen g++ use 2 GB's to compile one C++ > file and then the linker (wlink) fail without the full address range > available > VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT=3072 in config.sys. Only works on some systems as > PCI space may conflict. IBM didn't seem to finish the high memory support. Yeah - and I wish to challenge that entire concept that you "need" anywhere near 2 GB "today". PDOS/386 can be put on a 360k floppy (or close). And it has a 2.5 MB memory requirement just to start. I can work on trimming that down, but it's fairly pointless as I wish to run a fork of gcc 3.2.3 anyway, and that requires something like 32 MB or 64 MB when given a reasonable task (like getting it to recompile itself with full optimization). It has taken me 3 decades to get here. A lot of that time was spent on the IBM mainframe where I was trying to get things working too. I was chided by many people for "my" program (gcc 3.2.3) needing more than the 16 MiB limit of the (older) S/370 IBM mainframe. I think it is unreasonable to require programs to fit into 16 MiB (minus overhead of maybe 6 MiB), but others disagree. However, I do agree that going a long way above 16 MiB, even coming close to 2 GiB (a different mainframe limit), is ridiculous. And that if you need that much memory, it's more likely that you are doing something wrong. And 64-bit is unnecessary for the same reason. Which means that OS/2 should be perfectly fine for the job. Indeed - 512 MiB should be perfectly fine. wlink will similarly be replaced, in this case by the public domain and supported pdld. Today I am going to be looking at gccwin (my fork of gcc 3.2.3) to see if I can add the "_System" keyword to support the OS/2 API calls. Otherwise we should be able to work around the issue elsewhere. I believe that will be a much more viable toolchain. For me at least. Because that's another rationalization I would like to do - sticking with fullscreen text. Note that blind people can only "see" text, and that's a "lowest common denominator" that I'd like to target. But yeah - nearly everyone else has a different interest. And that would nominally be fine. But it ends up with code that is not understood and not maintainable, and you end up with: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-you-leave-software-engineering/answer/Jeff-Sturm-2 "The inmates are truly running the asylum, as the saying goes" I wish to challenge that "leadership". If I treat Linux as a glorified BIOS, a 53k executable gives me a mini OS/2 clone, a mini Win32 clone, and it also runs the flagship PDOS-generic apps. It took 30 years to create something that is conceptually simple and somewhat obvious in hindsight. I say "somewhat" because it is not that obvious that you can run different APIs with a single C library, and I sometimes need to look into the code to answer "how on earth does this work?". And all sitting ready for anyone at all to commercially exploit. BFN. Paul.