News

OS/2 VOICE is sending this message on behalf of bww bitwise works GmbH:

The BWW team is back in business. They are currently updating the OS/2 toolchain to prepare for a new iteration of the browser campaign. On the
roadmap:

• Update GCC from version 9 to version 16 on OS/2 - this is a long planned update since GCC 9 is well behind the current compiler life cycle.
• Update binutils to the latest version (needed by GCC and virtually any other project using the GCC compiler).
• Adopt the cross-os2emx effort from KO Myung-Hun to build OS/2 software on macOS and Linux (this includes integration of relevant patches
  directly into LIBCn and OS/2 versions of GCC, binutils and other toolchain components to simplify future maintenance).
• Make LIBCn itself buildable using cross-os2emx to simplify its further development.
• Polish the fresh version of OpenSSH (especially important for cross-compiling as it allows to run build results on OS/2 hosts remotely
  from non-OS/2 build machines).
• Update Qt 5 to Qt 6.

The roadmap assumes releasing new RPMs for all listed and related components to support our usual simple installation methods on OS/2
machines.

Depending on the overall success of the cross-os2emx effort there are also plans to make RPMs themselves buildable on Linux machines (including cloud services and CI environments) which should dramatically improve the quality and overall state of our OS/2 RPM repositories.

For those who don't know what cross-compiling is. It's a technique that allows to compile software intended to be run on one platform (the target platform) on another (the build platform). In our case it means compiling and building native OS/2 programs on Linux or on macOS. After they are built, they can be installed on any OS/2 machine normally via RPM (or from ZIP archives). Since they are native OS/2 binaries, there is no difference between these binaries and the same programs built directly on OS/2. The difference is the development cycle. Building OS/2 software on a modern 64-bit platform removes many 32-bit OS/2 limitations that affect the build process itself, significantly improves build times and simplifies improvement and maintenance. For instance, git for OS/2 takes two minutes to build on a very fast OS/2 machine running on a modern AMD Ryzen chipset and only 20 seconds (6 times faster) on a macOS machine running on M1 Max. GIt is a relatively small software package and the absolute difference does not look dramatic, but for large projects such as Qt 6 the absolute difference is expected to be many hours of build time and it also saves the developers from constant problems of large projects like getting out of memory while building and other similar limitations.

The BWW team thanks KO Myung-Hun, Paul Smedley, Dave Yeo and other OS/2 developers and enthusiasts who have been actively contributing to the OS/2 platform throughout the recent years. The collective efforts of these people is what keeps the OS/2 train running.

Best regards,

Roderick Klein