The Search for a C Compiler

Saturday, 4th June 2016

I've spent more time playing with the HP 100LX I bought last September.  For a while I've had a CF disk full of strategy games, but more recently I've added to it a disk full of RPG and adventure games, and another one full of platformers and puzzlers.  And now I want to have a development disk too.

Back in the day, I started playing with Personal C Compiler and moved on to DJGPP, the DOS port of GCC.  I also used a few commercial compilers: Topspeed C, Microsoft QuickC and Borland Turbo C.  More recently I've become aware of Watcom C too.

DJGPP is no use to me if I want to target the 100LX.  It's limited to 32-bit architectures like the 80386 and later.  The 100LX has an 80186 processor, so not only can I not run DJGPP on it, but I can't even develop for the 100LX on a modern PC. I'll have to rule out Topspeed C and QuickC too, as I can no longer get hold of a copy.  So my choices are now:

• Watcom C
• Personal C Compiler
• Borland Turbo C

I've been playing with Watcom C under DOSBox.  I've written a few programs that play with the CGA Palettes I wrote about previously, loading images and writing them to CGA screen memory.  It seems competent, but I'm not sure I'll manage to squeeze it onto the 16MB CF card I have available.

Personal C Compiler is small, and creates small fast executables too: perfect for a small project on the 100LX.  The downside is that it's K&R compatible, not ANSI standard, and its own documentation is incomplete.  So I'll have to rely quite a bit on those old C books I have on the shelf.

Finally there's Turbo C, which is probably the most promising of the lot.  It's been released for free download, had a great deal of popularity back in the day, and will certainly support any of the projects I want to do on the 100LX.  It also has modest disk space requirements.  My first attempts to use it under DOSBox didn't go well, however.

I think I'll put both Personal C and Turbo C on the CF disk, and see how each one goes.