The History of Djgpp

Re:The History of Djgpp by dafelst on Sunday November 08, 2026 @05:53PM (#50418393)

DJGPP and the Allegro game library were my first foray into C++ in around 1996-1997 if I recall. Having access to a proper 32-bit protected mode system in DOS (without having to pirate a bunch of other compilers!) was a pretty incredible step forward for the community.

I pretty quickly moved onto building in Win95/98 with MSVC not long after, but I am very grateful to DJ for the compiler and Shawn Hargreaves for Allegro.

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Re:The History of Djgpp by bena on Sunday November 08, 2026 @07:40PM (#50419454)

Same. Djgpp with allegro was a godsend for someone without the funds or means to purchase software.

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Re:The History of Djgpp by grumbel on Sunday November 08, 2026 @08:24PM (#50419781)

One really nice thing with Allegro is that it's still around, many Linux distributions still ship it and those 30 year old games can still be recompiled quite easily.

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Re:The History of Djgpp by the_af on Sunday November 08, 2026 @10:05PM (#50420519)

Ditto.

I'm surprised that DJGPP is sometimes mentioned here, but (my impression at least) Shawn Hargreaves and Allegro seldom are. To my young self, Allegro was a huge deal.

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Re:The History of Djgpp by oso2k on Sunday November 08, 2026 @11:12PM (#50420984)

DJ’s still at Red Hat. I talked to him in our (RH’s) retro slack channel occasionally. PDPs, DECs, VAXes, Commodore, Amiga, SUN, and DOS are frequently discussed there.

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Re:The History of Djgpp by bacon_waffle on Sunday November 08, 2026 @11:14PM (#50420999)

I fondly remember DJGPP and Allegro from my youth as well, it turns out that DJ has just recently opened a few bugs against FreeCAD, which I used to contribute a bit of time to :)

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Re:The History of Djgpp by djdelorie on Monday November 09, 2026 @08:33AM (#50425374)

I'm still around. Some parts of my site get updates when I want to share what I'm working on, which is mostly woodworking, CNC and 3D printing these days, plus technology updates for my house. I can mostly be found on the glibc mailing lists and a few cnc forums.

DJGPP itself doesn't get updated much these days because there's no need to ;-)

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Re:The History of Djgpp by the_af on Thursday November 12, 2026 @08:00AM (#50466498)

Great to hear you're still around.

I'm sure you get this a lot, but a lot of us started writing software (usually games) and experimenting with DJGPP, it meant a ton to a lot of people. You rock.

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