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Comment by oso2k | Hacker News Reader

Deming said...“In God we trust; all others must bring data”.

Sagan said..."extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

It must be though to be Walter Bright on HN. He wrote the compiler himself. he wrote dlang. He has been in this game for a lifetime. He would know, right?

I don't think he is the boasting type, even though he has enough reasons to boast… being the only person that ever wrote a C++ compiler by himself and all.

One thing people should be aware of, is that C++ exceptions and RTTI are unworkable for a 16 bit target. Those have to be disabled for 16 bit code gen.

The reason is pretty simple - all the support code would exceed 640K. You wouldn't get past a demo program.

Templates work, but you have to be pretty cautious in avoiding template bloat. Probably better off just avoiding them.

Also remember that he says for DOS not any target. Digital Mars is incredibly old but that makes it perfect for DOS.

The backend is also used for the DMD D compiler.

I have a lot of respect for Walter Bright. And I agree, he's typically not boastful without good evidence. Walter is also very accomplished. However, DigitalMars compilers on DOS haven't been popular in a very long time. And if there are some good tricks or some sort of advantage to using them for building and maintaining DOS apps and FreeDOS, then there would be a few people interested in exploring & understanding that.

The main cause of that is I was slow to make the compiler open source. It is open source now.

https://github.com/DigitalMars/Compiler

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