johnm@trsvax.UUCP (11/24/88)
This is directed at Walter Bright and anyone else who may be listening at Zortech: I have spoken with some folks at Borland on CompuServe and they indicated that they would be willing to give you the format for the Turbo Debugger if you would ask them for it. I (as a mere user :-) would greatly appreciate it if ZTC could directly generate TD compatible code rather than forcing me to run it through TDCONVRT which is SLOOWWWW even on my 20Mhz 386 machine with a VERY fast SCSI drive! I feel that the Turbo Assembler/Turbo Debugger package nicely complements Zortech's C++ and a better mating of the two could only make things better. It would also give me another argument for using your C++ on some future development projects. John Munsch Matchmaker at Large
bright@Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) (11/29/88)
In article <194400002@trsvax> johnm@trsvax.UUCP writes:
<This is directed at Walter Bright and anyone else who may be listening at
<Zortech:
<I have spoken with some folks at Borland on CompuServe and they indicated that
<they would be willing to give you the format for the Turbo Debugger if you
<would ask them for it.
I have asked them for it. They said they would send it to me, but never have.
The persons I talked to are Brad Silverberg and Phillipe Kahn. What else
can I do?
I believe strongly in standardized formats. I think a customer should be
able to get a compiler from vendor A, a linker from vendor B, and a debugger
from vendor C and have them all work together (I have a component stereo,
all the pieces are from different companies!).
My compiler generates standard Intel OMF files (it always has), with the
Microsoft extensions. Back when Lattice was king, my compiler used the
same conventions
as Lattice. The world changed, and now the Microsoft conventions are the
dominant format, and I changed the compiler to match.
The librarian and linker use the Microsoft .LIB format.
When casting around for what to do about a debug format, the most promising
thing available was the CodeView format. Rather than invent a new,
incompatible format, I chose to go with an existing one. This is so that
customers could use their favorite debugger, instead of being forced to
use Zortech's (we are working on one!).
The only difficulty with all this is that Microsoft has chosen to make
the .LIB and CodeView formats secret. What this does is encourage the
proliferation of incompatible formats, to the detriment of software
developers everywhere. I have wasted a lot of time figuring these formats
out, and so has nearly every other language vendor.
I have strongly encouraged Microsoft and Borland to publish their file
formats, to no avail. Borland knows the CodeView format. If they wish
to invent a new one, and keep it secret, I'll leave them to their own
devices.
Version 1.07 of my compiler generates CodeView format records, and CodeView
can be used to symbolically debug the programs. When the Zortech debugger
arrives, it will be driven off of CodeView records. If Turbo Debugger
has a problem with this, I suggest that the difficulty is in Borland's camp.