An MS-Dos C compiler for $49.95 ? (really DeSmet C)

[John McNamee]

The DeSmet package is excellent if you only need a small model compiler.
My personal opinion is that the 8086 line is so braindamaged when you go
outside of 64K code/64K data that large model isn't worth it. For $109
you get an awful lot of bang for the buck (I don't use the symbolic debugger,
but it is probably excellent too). The best thing about the system is that
it is a complete development environment, and is blindingly fast. You
get the fastest C compiler, fastest assembler, and fastest linker that I
have ever seen. On my Tandy 2000 (an 8Mhz 186 system), they are disk bound.
I put the compiler temporary files on RAM disk, and it seems that 90% of
the compile time is spent loading the compiler and source text off disk.
If I had the memory to put the whole compiler/linker/library on RAM disk,
I bet it would compile and link 50K source programs in under 30 seconds.
I should also point out that Desmet includes an editor that is fantastic.
It isn't EMACS, but it is fast and well suited to editing source code.

"Turbo C" for Borland will not be able to touch this package unless Borland
includes a good linking method. Remember that Turbo Pascal is based around
idea of one source file for the entire program (I guess they have something
like #include, but I don't think that counts). Borland has yet to prove they
can produce a system as fast as Turbo Pascal when separate compilation is
needed. Turbo Modula will tell (it should be out before Turbo C).
--

			 John McNamee
		..!decvax!philabs!sbcs!bnl44!jpm
			jpm at BNL44.ARPA

		  "MS-DOS is a communist plot"