[Gs-devel] Re: OS/2 emx/gcc project status

[Russell Lang]

> I understand you're taking care of the OS/2 work for us. Projects.htm 
> has the following entry:
> 
> > We would like Ghostscript to work with the free emx/gcc and rsx 
> > libraries,
> > to provide an alternative DOS, Windows 95/98/NT, and OS/2 
> > implementation that requires no proprietary, commercial compilers.  We 
> > think Ghostscript's existing OS/2 makefile already includes most of 
> > what is needed.  If someone is willing to do the work, we will be happy 
> > to include this in our list of supported platforms and to distribute 
> > the makefiles.  If interested, please consult [broken link to 
> > www.leo.org].
> 
> I just wanted to check if this was still accurate, and whether you had a 
> better place to point people for info.

This was something written by Peter.  While you can use EMX/GCC with 
RSXNT to build Win32 executables, you are probably restricted to 
using GDB as the debugger, which is a little painful.
Most people just buy a copy of MSVC++.

You can also use EMX/GCC to build DOS extended executables.
The os2.mak did at one stage do this, but the DLL changes in 1996 
broke this.  You needed OS/2 for the build (IBM nmake) but the 
resultant a.out style exe with EMX loader would run under DOS.