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Comment · 3 years ago
Ah no, that doesn't constitute "proof" of the original statement. However, it does now introduce a burden on me to show one single example to prove that I have not (to date) dismissed everything that everyone said. Prior to this the burden was on the other person to demonstrate that I had dismissed everything everyone had said. And we can be generous and allow that there is an implied "during the period that I was a member of the group", as it is increasingly absurd that he "knows" what I did in a group that he isn't even a member of. Note that his statement is also an active rejection. So if someone said "Ok, I'm going to the beach" and I fail to reply at all, because I have no reason to dismiss that statement, that would also constitute a counter-example. It's quite normal to not make an effort to say "I agree/don't dispute" to every single sentence someone says. So if you give me a time period, I'll post a link to a message where there is no sign of me dismissing what they said.
Comment · 3 years ago
Own implementation of MSVCRT.DLL (C library - just C90) and KERNEL32.DLL (subset) too, that do 32-bit MSDOS-like calls.
Comment · 3 years ago
Source or binary?

In both cases - it depends.

PDOS/86 will certainly run some binaries. But if you say "what about xyz" the answer is likely "probably not".

I don't have a lot of interest in 16-bit, so it's there for demonstration purposes mainly.

My interest is 32-bit.

The biggest genuine task I do is getting GCC to compile itself with full optimization, which requires something like 23 MB of memory on the mainframe and something like 37 MB on a PC.

Far far below the 4 GiB barrier (or even 2 GiB barrier), but above even 16 MiB, nevermind 640k.

If it is source code you have, then it will require recompilation at a minimum. I made use of that fact to provide a C-defined API to wrap the INT calls, so at least nominally you need to use those C functions. But you may be able to get away with an existing int86x call (or even assembler instruction), as the interrupts do exist (ie even in 32-bit). If your MSDOS program is C90-compliant then that should work unchanged - but that is the case for any environment, not just MSDOS or PDOS/386.

Comment · 3 years ago
The huge memory model supposedly has a 4% overhead in practice, cited by someone who did such programming under OS/2. Personally I wasn't able to detect any slowdown at all, which is not surprising, because you are normally expected to be bottlenecked on some application doing some calculation, not the OS.

I am not aware that I have any obsession with Unix. For PDOS/386, PDOS/86 and PDOS-generic I use an API inspired by MSDOS. For z/PDOS I use the MVS API. I specifically don't want anything to do with Posix which mandated fork() but didn't provide for simple memory allocation.

Comment · 3 years ago
Exactly. Conventional wisdom said that the 16 MiB barrier was impossible to break. After that was broken, the next thing that was impossible to break was the 2 GiB barrier. That was broken too. I'm talking about 32-bit S/370 code. Obviously IBM independently broke the 2 GiB barrier by switching to 64-bit programming.

But in hindsight, a "properly-written" program from the 1970s would have been restricted to 16 MiB at that time, but magically turned into 2 GiB in the 1980s, and then magically turned into 4 GiB in I think the 2010s (but this is murkier about when you want to start counting - real hardware was only demonstrated in 2022 or 2023 - can't remember).

Comment · 3 years ago
stdint is a fundamentally wrong thing to do. If people were doing int_least32_t or whatever, ok, maybe that fits in with the spirit of C. But not int32_t.

"long long" itself is a fundamental violation of the original language too. If you want some large value - 512 bits, 1024 bits, 1113 bits, whatever - that's what "long" is for.

I am writing in C, not Turtle Graphics. I'm happy for the entire PDOS suite to be rewritten in Pascal or any other language. But first I haven't even completed C90. And it is extremely difficult trying to get a C90-compliant compiler too. I still haven't determined whether I need to dumb down PDOS to the C90 subset that SubC provides.

There are now makefiles for the 2 executables that I previously only provided bat files for. The bat files themselves were trivial anyway and I would have converted them to shell script for you had you asked. In actual fact, those .bat files are already shell scripts as far as I know. You can rename .bat to .sh if you want.

And you don't need to use Windows/Linux anymore, PDOS is self-hosting, including the building of the tools.

Comment · 3 years ago
Dismissing one phrase/sentence from one person is a different concept to dismissing everything from everyone. And I have counter-examples of people providing value information. Only one counter-example is required to dismiss the original claim. Quite apart from the fact that it's his burden to prove.
Comment · 3 years ago
A guy turned up to the PDOS discord and said he had a mainframe, then after some discussion he invited another guy with a mainframe to join. Neither had hard disks though, so I had to IPL from (emulated) tape. There are photos in the hercules-380 (not os380) group.
Comment · 3 years ago
What does the UK and Australia consider Shakespeare's "Macbeth" to be?

That's the concept, regardless of whether they (we) chose to name it differently.

Comment · 3 years ago
I dismissed "everything" that "everyone" said? What nonsense. Some people on the list made extremely valuable contributions. Some even provided extremely valuable code. Whatever this stuff was that I allegedly unreasonably dismissed, it apparently didn't stop getting PDOS working. Note that that was predominantly a mainframe list, and PDOS now works on real z/Arch hardware. And accesses 4 GiB of memory instead of being limited to 2 GiB. On real hardware. Despite being almost entirely S/370 code (generated by a slightly modified GCC 3.2.3).
Comment · 3 years ago
I am the main author of PDOS. I am not claiming to "know better" (or even know what that means). And I don't recognize your description of "PCs ought" as an accurate description of my views. Or even understand what that means either. If you ask a specific question I'll try to give an answer, based on my current understanding, but note that all my beliefs are tentative.

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