Open Watcom

Open Watcom is a toolchain that includes an IDE, workframe, source level debugger, assembler and compilers for C, C++ and Fortran. It is available and mature for development on DOS, OS/2 16 and 32 bit, Windows 3.1, Windows 95/98/Me, Windows NT/2000/XP and later, and has a Linux port that being newer is not quite as fully formed but is getting lots of updates. The system has a full cross platform capability, i.e. the OS/2 version can be used to develop for DOS and MS Windows targets and vice versa.

The system was forked in 2012 after a member of the OpenWatcom team deleted almost all contributions to the system from others than the core team, the bulk of the developers that had been actively working on the system now work on the fork that is informally know as the "Malak" version. The deletions had been an ongoing problem ever since the inception of the project and are the reason why various attempts to update the FORTRAN side of the compiler have disappeared off the face of the earth. Most if not all new development of the Open Watcom code-base now happens on the fork and not on the original version of OpenWatcom.

Versions

• Latest Official Version for OS/2-eCS: Open Watcom 1.9 / June 2010
• Latest version of the Malak Fork is 2.00 / May 2014 (Recommended)

Porting aids

• LC-Port - Lattice C porting library - Commercial - Discontinued.

Links

• Home page: http://www.openwatcom.org/
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/openwatcom/ (Link to downloads of the Malak fork of OW)
• https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2 (Main development rep of the Malak fork)
• The Watcom C/C++ Programmer's FAQ

License

Published under the Open Watcom Public License. Allows free commercial and non-commercial use of Open Watcom.

Related Articles

• C++ Compiler Review Part 1 (September 1995) and Part 3 (November 1995) by Gordon Zeglinski.
• Using Watcom C/C++ 11.0c on OS/2 Michal Necasek (November 2001)

Open Watcom history

The Open Watcom system traces its roots to the Waterloo Basic interpreter developed at the University of Waterloo in Canada in the mid 1970's, that was later used as a basis of a number of development systems for languages as disparate as Pascal, Fortran, APL, GKS and Cobol. A number of employees from the Computer Systems Group of the UoW left in 1981 to form the Watcom company that made development tools based on their earlier work, initially targeting QNX, but later adding DOS, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows to their target list. While QNX hosted versions of the tools disappeared from the last edition of the commercial version of Watcom, it was still available as a target architecture.

The company was taken over by Powersoft in 1994, which in turn was taken over by Sybase a year later. Since neither company was interested in the Watcom C/C++/FORTRAN tools, they were discontinued and after pressure from graphic driver software developer Scitech, agreed to open source them.