Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrlonglong | Hacker News Reader

Use Watcom C/C++, it's freely available and fully supports protected mode extenders on MSDOS. It might be a bit dated but it works and generates pretty tight code.

View on HN

I was asking about some new languages. C and C++ are quite old.

These new languages are way too big to build themselves on MS-DOS and there are already good compilers. And the runtime will be huge too, compared to native hosted compilers designed for a constrained platform. Nobody does embedded Rust or Go or whatever you have.

>Nobody does embedded Rust

Oh yes they do.

Rust is used for embedded work because (like C and unlike most languages) it is easy to arrange for the output of a Rust compiler to work without any runtime library.

No they don’t. I’ve never ever heard of embedded Rust. Not saying it’s impossible but it just doesn’t happen.

There has been a massive amount of embedded rust activity for at least 5 years.

I just checked and while it’s promoted on the Rust site I can’t find a single embedded Rust product. If it existed it would surely be mentioned by the Rust Internet Defense Force. I certainly can’t find any evidence of “massive” Rust activity in embedded in the last half decade.

Searching on "Rust Embedded Microcontroller" on one of the big job boards yields 24 hits:

https://www.indeed.com/q-Rust-Embedded-Microcontroller-jobs....

Some relevant search terms: Oxide Computer, Ferrous Systems, Oxidize - The Embedded Rust Conference.

That's what I'm asking about. Those NIM, V-LANG etc claims to be super small and fast languages - but yet, they do not have small standalone compilers.

In contrast there are plenty of C/C++ compilers - but I'm not interested in those languages(boring and DJGPP[gcc/g++ for DOS) are too big for machine with 120MB of disk space).

C is old. C++20 is as modern as anything, and more than most.

But C++20 is very different from the dialect supported by an old Watcom compiler. :)

True, but there is no need to confine oneself to an old Watcom compiler just to generate 80286 code. We had cross compilers even back then.

As old I meant date of creation of language. C++ is over 30 years old now, even if it changes A LOT between versions.

For example NIM is "new", same with Rust.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com