EMX and DJGPP

In this post I will tell you about EMX, DJGPP, their advantages and disadvantages.

DJGPP (Dj Delorie Gnu Programming Platform) is an open-source set of GNU programs, ported to DOS x86 processors. It gived possibility for different utils, such as gcc, binutils, fileutils, textutils, bash, wget, bison, flex. Game Quake I was ported to DOS with DJGPP help. DJGPP is only for DOS (and DOS-compatible OSes). Site: http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/

EMX is another set of GNU programs for OS/2 and DOS. It also has lots of utils ported, but some of them are for OS/2 only (like m4 or sed). Xfree86 system was ported to OS/2 using this extender.

If we compare DJGPP and EMX from perspective about porting some programs, DJGPP is commonly better. It has newer versions of utils (for example, GCC 4.2.2 in compare with 2.8.1), and these utils sometimes works better than on EMX.

More about comparision DJGPP and EMX: http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/faq/what-is-djgpp/emx-comparison.txt

What about porting Wine (currently version 960811)? It that case EMX is better because one simply thing: old programs sometimes needs old development tools. For example, GCC from EMX (version 2.8.1) silently passes string

#ifdef 0

and GCC from DJGPP says warning on this string. Nobody can promise that such warnings will not transform to errors.

Another important thing is memory, function memalign, to be exact. It is implemented in DJGPP and not implemented in EMX. But in DJGPP this function is VERY, very, so it was easier to rewrite it manually in EMX and use as additional library, than recompile DJGPP libc.

Also EMX has more Unix-like directory structure. This is just cosmetic advantage.