[comp.lang.c] Bugs in Microsoft compilers

markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark William Hopkins) (04/18/91)

In article <1991Apr18.133035.15827@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> nengle@copper.ucs.indiana.edu (nathan engle) writes:
>  I was personally very disappointed with the state of first release of
>6.00. It had lots of things that just didn't work, and several that did
>work but very slowly. For about 4 months I did a complete backtrack and
>started moving all my stuff over to Zortech (they send you their bug
>list for free). However, eventually 6.00a came out and most of my
>complaints were cleared up so I'm running with it right now...

I'm having somewhat similar problems now, after finding a problem in QC2.5's
incremental linker and object code generation process.  What makes it really
inaccessible is that they made their object code format proprietary which
entails a lengthy period of analysis/decoding/reverse-enginerring.  And of
course, no source is ever distributed.

Pretty much for that reason, I'm seriously considering switching over to GNU's
C compiler (ported to DOS), especially if it comes with source.

One thing that would have helped is if Microsoft had a place reachable by
e-mail to communicate with...

keithro@microsoft.UUCP (Keith ROWE) (04/23/91)

>I'm having somewhat similar problems now, after finding a problem in QC2.5's
>incremental linker and object code generation process.  What makes it really
>inaccessible is that they made their object code format proprietary which
>entails a lengthy period of analysis/decoding/reverse-enginerring.  And of
>course, no source is ever distributed.

The MS C 6.0 object code formats, Codeview OMF formats and lots of other
good things are available in the "MS C Developer's Toolkit" (part no.
048-044-060).

Similar extra information on Windows formats are available in the "Windows
Developer's Notebook" (sorry, I don't have the part no. on hand).

Either of these can be ordered through the regular telephone channels.

We also hosted the Open Tools Summit on April 9 and 10 to make the formats
for our next round of language tools available.   The notes from this 
meeting will be available real soon now.

I hope this helps,

Keith Rowe
Program Manager, C Languages
Microsoft
uunet!microsoft!keithro