Hacker News Reader

Comment by qx89l4 | Hacker News Reader

Targeting 8086-level of instructions was actually my first idea. It wasn't possible with gcc/clang, but Turbo C is freeware these days, so... ;) In case you're interested, see https://github.com/luke8086/nf/

View on HN

Have you tried running `nf` or `boot2c` against NuXT [0] or Nano8088 [1]?

[0] https://monotech.fwscart.com/NuXT_-_MicroATX_Turbo_XT_-_955M...

[1] https://monotech.fwscart.com/Nano_8088_-_Turbo_XT_SBC_Compac...

Hadn't heard of them, thanks for the links!

As someone mentioned below you could also use OpenWatcom, if for no other reason than it should have a slightly better optimizer (though from my tests i haven't seen much of a difference between the two, at least for code i tried to optimize a lot myself). AFAIK one of the OWv2 contributors is working on a 16bit OS so the 16bit support should be excellent.

OWv2 is also available as a Linux binary so you could use it for crosscompiling in a similar way to GCC.

Good point, OpenWatcom is obviously miles ahead of Turbo C, but it's also much more complex. I tinkered with it for a while, and ended up using the latter for its simplicity.

DOSBox can be easily installed on any system, you can save the entire C: in a git repo and it'll probably keep working in any number of years from now :)

Meanwhile, OWC doesn't have packages in popular Linux distros, only a custom binary installer, and on MacOS it doesn't even have that.

You could also use OpenWatcom, I think. https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2

Reply on news.ycombinator.com