Richard Stallman said it couldn't be done, so he built DJGPP
The History of Djgpp
In 1989, after Richard Stallman told him gcc was too big to port to 16-bit MS-DOS, DJ Delorie set out to prove otherwise. He built a custom extender with virtual memory, ported BSD's libc, and created the first gcc that ran on DOS. DJGPP grew into a full 32-bit development platform used by Quake, GhostScript, and countless other projects.
Challenge in hand, I began.
- dafelst
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.
- JimDabell
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39038095 (Jan 2024, 109 comments)
- pacman128
I used this back in the 90s in the 32 bit protected mode assembly language course I taught (along with the NASM assembler); so that my students had a free development environment to use on their own pcs. It worked great when most courses used MASM 16 bit real mode.