broehl@wateng.UUCP (Bernie Roehl) (07/15/85)
Yes, I'll gladly 'wave the flag' for the DeSmet compiler.
I've been using it for a couple of years now, with excellent results.
It's extremely fast, produces fairly dense code (most benchmarks have
it right up there with Lattice) and comes with an assembler (way faster
than Microsoft's), a linker, a utility for building libraries, a full-screen
editor, a cross-referencing prettyprinter, easy 8087 support (just link
in the appropriate library), and lots of odds'n'ends ("life", a hex-dump
utility, a curly-bracket checker, all with source; a ramdisk and a utility
to expand your keyboard typeahead buffer to 128 bytes). All for $109.
For an extra $50, they throw in a full-screen symbolic debugger.
The compiler is a full-blown implementation, without structure assignment
and enumerated types.
Other differences: #includes can only be nested 3 deep (hasn't
been a problem for me), char's are unsigned (makes life much easier in
most cases) and there's no unsigned long. Also, macros are not expanded
inside quoted strings.
The compiler supports overlays, so you can fit big applications on small
machines. The current release of the compiler supports one model (128k,
i.e. 64k of code plus 64k of data).
Assuming the above limitations are not a problem for you (they haven't been
for me), then I would strongly recommend the DeSmet (CWare) package on the
basis of its low cost and good performance.
--Bernie
--
-Bernie Roehl (University of Waterloo)
...decvax!watmath!wateng!broehl