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A comment on Show HN: A simple way to write standalone C programs for i386. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: A simple way to write standalone C programs for ... by Crinus on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @08:16AM (#21135559)
XT implies 8086 and there are more real address mode instructions than those available in 8086. AFAIK real address mode can use pretty much any 32bit instructions with a prefix, which is what this project is doing.

(this incompatibility bit me a bit many years ago when i was writing a small real mode OS in assembly - i used a bunch of instructions i thought were available in 8086 but when i tried the OS on a real XT machine it would lock up :-P)

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Re:Show HN: A simple way to write standalone C programs for ... by qx89l4 on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @12:25PM (#21138210)
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/
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Re:Show HN: A simple way to write standalone C programs for ... by oso2k on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @01:14PM (#21138692)
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...

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Re:Show HN: A simple way to write standalone C programs for ... by qx89l4 on Thursday October 03, 2019 @12:57PM (#21149113)
Hadn't heard of them, thanks for the links!
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Re:Show HN: A simple way to write standalone C programs for ... by Crinus on Thursday October 03, 2019 @06:45AM (#21145523)
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.

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Re:Show HN: A simple way to write standalone C programs for ... by qx89l4 on Thursday October 03, 2019 @12:55PM (#21149093)
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.

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Re:Show HN: A simple way to write standalone C programs for ... by ofrzeta on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @03:24PM (#21139905)
You could also use OpenWatcom, I think. https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2
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