ReactOS Forum

All mainstream OSes have basic development environments so as not to require user install 3rd party program to develop software at least in the simplest circumstances. MS-DOS has QuickBASIC and MASM, Windows up to XP has MASM for this purpose. Since ReactOS is implemented in C and C++, we need the independent C and C++ compilers and an assembler, so we will not rely on GCC/VS C++ build capabilities. It will also give us the flexibility to implement supplemental utilities in any language as long as we target our C ABI of our compilers.
EDIT: grammar fix

Feel free to rewrite what GCC took ages to accomplish. We can use MSVC, GCC and LLVM (partially). So everyone has some goodie to use.

Actually no I don't see why this has to be done. ReactOS is free software, and one of the major benefits of a free software project is to use pre-existing parts so you can focus on things that don't exist. That's why Wine is part of ReactOS. There's nothing wrong with GCC. In fact Apple themselves use LLVM, that's a company not above making their own computers. If anything, I think MS just wants their own compiler because, at least until recently, they absolutely hate FOSS. But, hey, if you're all about brands, go ahead and fork something and rename it.

Konata wrote:If anything, I think MS just wants their own compiler because, at least until recently, they absolutely hate FOSS.

You need to know that MS was first of all a company specialized in computer languages, before starting to write OSes, so it was natural for them to use their compilers for writing their OSes, when they started to write them (MS-DOS, OS/2, Windows) and, at that time, I don't know whether there were FOSS compilers already existing and if there was some GCC around, it was certainly too rudimentary compared to MS in-house compilers...

Compiler is something special in a sotftware toolchain. It takes your source program, and translates to something, you trust to be, the machine readable instructions for your program. There is a famous lecture about patching a compiler to purposedly emit backdoors into your program. You trust the compiler implicitly if you did not/could not understand/read the compiler's source code. This trust becomes explicit if you have read all the source code and understood if thoroughly. Therefore a foreign compiler means an extra party to trust. They would only have to trust us if we had our own compiler.

In the early days, operating systems came with compilers so that your computer could actually do something. Until at least the time when BBSes were widespread and every town had a computer store, there was a good chance that the first program you ran on your computer was one that you wrote yourself. It's 2014 now and it's rarely necessary to write your own software any more, when any functionality you could possibly want is available in a free program that you can find in under a minute on Google. If anyone using ROS wants to write their own software anyway, they're free to go online and download any compiler they want. There is utterly no need for ROS to come with its own compiler, or almost any other utility. Any compilers (or other useful utilities) known to work in ROS can be added to RAPPS.

erkinalp wrote:Compiler is something special in a sotftware toolchain. It takes your source program, and translates to something, you trust to be, the machine readable instructions for your program. There is a famous lecture about patching a compiler to purposedly emit backdoors into your program. You trust the compiler implicitly if you did not/could not understand/read the compiler's source code. This trust becomes explicit if you have read all the source code and understood if thoroughly. Therefore a foreign compiler means an extra party to trust. They would only have to trust us if we had our own compiler.

So my dear friend, guess what YOU use to build stuff on YOUR Ubuntu Linux? Hot air!? C'mon you cant be serious with that reasoning for demanding us to write a own compiler!

erkinalp wrote:All mainstream OSes has basic development environments so as not to require user install 3rd party program to develop software at least in the simplest circumstances. MS-DOS has QuickBASIC and MASM, Windows up to XP has MASM for this purpose. Since ReactOS is implemented in C and C++, we need the independent C and C++ compilers and an assembler, so we will not rely on GCC/VS C++ build capabilities. It will also give us the flexibility to implement supplemental utilities in any language as long as we target our C ABI in our compilers.

Why on Earth should the ReactOS developers divert what little man power they have to write a compiler for which already two major open source ones exist? And don't come with the "trust" thing. If you really want trusted software you need to punch in the code for an assembler in machine language by hand to be entirely on the safe side and even then the CPU or any part of the PC hardware could be the problematic one!
Paranoia is all nice and well, but one definitely should not overdo it.

Yours,
Sven

This is a good suggestion. The toolkits for developing react os must be standardized in order to create a easy, systemically, fast, stable, and consistent development for react os.

rizalmartin wrote:This is a good suggestion. The toolkits for developing react os must be standardized in order to create a easy, systemically, fast, stable, and consistent development for react os.

And they are, you can find the build instructions here.

rizalmartin wrote:This is a good suggestion. The toolkits for developing react os must be standardized in order to create a easy, systemically, fast, stable, and consistent development for react os.

Now guess why we have a own build system? It can output build files for MSVC and GCC/MingW-w64...

Because MinGW created code poses some problems with MS C++ compiled code. Our own compiler may be MinGW-free and use pure WinAPI.

Please, before anyone wastes any more time. Let's think this through.

I'm not giving any opinion on what would be best for the project, simply asking:

Can any of you write such a compiler? Do any of you have the time, knowledge and resources to write such compiler?

If the answer is yes, if you feel like you can do an open-source MSVC-like compiler, then please go ahead. You can easily create a repository at github, bitbucket, or wherever else. Write the code, upload the code, and prove it.

If the answer is no, then consider the fact that we have a very limited amount of developers, with even more limited amount of spare time, and writing a compiler is a task comparably as large as an OS kernel. And if you haven't noticed it yet, after over 10 years our kernel is still not perfect.

Do you really want everyone to drop all the fixes and improvements they are making currently, in order to dedicate the next 10 years into writing a compiler, when we have a working build system that can take both MingW-GCC and any version of MSVC provided between VS2010 and VS2013, and ReactOS already works fine when compiled with any of them?

Regardless of the potential advantages or disadvantages that a specialized compiler may bring, there is absolutely no point in this discussion. The points have been made, now it's time to either make it happen, or let it be.

Please.

C'mon people, be serious. With all that idle workforce sitting around, I really believe we should create not only a C-Compiler, but also a little vectorizing supercomputer from scratch. It can't be that hard, after all. And if a few thousand people create GCC over the course of some 30 years, would that really stop some 10 developers of ours from creating the same thing in two months?

Because, you see, there are free tools around, but to be fashionable, we need our own one...

Aeneas wrote:C'mon people, be serious. With all that idle workforce sitting around, I really believe we should create not only a C-Compiler, but also a little vectorizing supercomputer from scratch. It can't be that hard, after all. And if a few thousand people create GCC over the course of some 30 years, would that really stop some 10 developers of ours from creating the same thing in two months?

Because, you see, there are free tools around, but to be fashionable, we need our own one...

Deal!!