Re: is Vax addressing sane today

On Sat, 28 Sep 2024 23:59:23 -0700
Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com> wrote:

EricP <ThatWouldBeTelling@thevillage.com> writes:
 

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
 

On Thu, 26 Sep 2024 13:13:02 -0400, EricP wrote:
 

I've always paid for mine.  My first C compiler came with the
WinNT 3.5 beta in 1992 for $99 and came with the development kit,
editor, source code debugger, tools, documentation.
A few hundred bucks is not going to hurt my business. 

>
Given that GCC offers more features and generates better code than
MSVC, the money may not matter to your business, but the quality of
the product will. 

>
GCC is a compiler collection not a integrated development kit for
Windows. I have no knowledge of what state GCC was in in 1992 but
it likely did not support the MS enhancements for Win32 programming:
structured exception handling, various ABI's, inline assembler,
defined behavior for some of C's undefined behavior,
later first-class-type support for 64-bit signed and unsigned
integers, and most important:  integration with the GUI source code
debugger.
>
Plus come with necessary API headers, various link libraries and
DLL's, supporting applications, documentation.
You know... what a product looks like. 

 
I am currently in the position of needing to take some code
written for Linux/Unix and get it running in MS Windows.
 
My attempts to use MSVC have been frustrating, because of some
limitations of that environment.  The two most prominent are
these:  long double is only 64 bits, and there are no integer
types of 128 bits that I could find.
 
Are there any MSVC folks here who can help with these problems?
I am not an MSVC expert by any means and easily could have missed
something.
 
I should mention that the code is written in C, not C++, and that
is not something I am at liberty to change.

Both of your problems have no [MSVC] solution right now.

In case of 128-bit integer, there is a chance that MSVC will support it
in the future.

In case of 80-bit long double, there is no chance. If MSVC ever
supports binary floating point wider than 64-bit on x86-64 platform
then it would be IEEE binary128 implemented in software. But even then
they would not use name 'long double' for a new type, because it would
break existing programs.


But if all you want is the program running on Windows, then the
solution is easy - use different compiler.
MSYS2 is just couple of clicks (and ~0.8 GB :( ) away.
After you have msys2 installed do
pacman -Sy
pacman mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gcc

Several hundreds of MB more and you have gcc14
Possible, I'd have to install make separately, i.e.
pacman make.