10 May
2024
10 May
'24
9:03 p.m.
On Fri, May 10, 2024 at 1:36 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On Fri, 10 May 2024, Stuff Received via cctalk
wrote:
I developed quite a bit and for many years with Microsoft C v6.0 under DOS
and it was not bad. The compiler was decently fast and once 486s and then
Pentiums became available compile time wasn't really an issue. It was
actually the least shitty Microsoft product I've ever used, next to MS-DOS
6.22. It was actually pretty good.
I recall that MS sold a Pascal compiler, possibly
from someone else. It
was
very slow and buggy. I heard a story that to
speed up disc access, MS
put
FAT-manipulation code in the actual compiler and
that occasionally
destroyed
the FAT.
Sorry Stuff, ain't so.
Bob Wallace wrote the Microsoft Pascal compiler, while he was at
Microsoft. He was their tenth employee. He told me that their runtime
library (which he didn't write) is buggy and slow.
So slow that it made benchmarks with their Fortran compiler (which also
used the buggy and slow runtime library), perform SLOWER than interpreted
BASIC.
If you had FAT corruption issues, perhaps you had
SMARTDRV enabled with
write cacheing (which did occasionally mess up the FAT).
A good example of why I generally hate MS software. But the solution was
easy: just turn off write-caching.
Sellam