General: which C compilers and which source code editors do you use?

[Martin Vieregg]

Programming is not my main job, and I use WDsibyl Pascal environment and for my few small C projects the old Borland C IDE 2.0 and there was not the need of installing a current C compiler. The feedback with MeShell users show me that a main purpose of MeShell will be to have a better frontend for commandline compilers. I first did not had these users in the focus and now I realize that these programs often generate more stderr output than stdout. So I have to check this purpose myself to find bugs and to get a feeling about the usability of my program with this purpose.

Now I want to install a current C compiler. I assume that meanwhile GCC is the only option after Open Watcom has been abandoned and Borland C for a much longer time. Is Gnu C 8.30 here:
https://smedley.id.au/downloads/gcc-8.3.0-os2-20190324.zip

the right location at the moment? I want to install the "mainstream" compiler, not the newest version. I prefer an easy installation.

How do you work with a commandline compiler? Which source code editors do you use?

[Dave Yeo]

OpenWatcom hasn't been abandoned, though development has slowed right down and is considered the best choice for OS/2 specific programming, including device drivers. It is also the source of stuff like our system linker as we have the source and ilink was just falling down for big projects. Linking xul.dll was taking 3GBs of address space at one point for example.
As for GCC, the easiest way to install it is with YUM/RPM or better, ANPM, where the current version is 9.2.0. There's a bunch of other requirements ranging from GCC-C++ to libc and libcx and a bunch of other stuff for building *nix based stuff.
While you can just run gcc from the command line, usually makefiles are used.
As for editors, I'm only a hobbyist, don't really write anything, more porting and mostly just use FC/2's editor and sometimes eFTE/2

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Hi Martin,

I used to do a whole lot of professional software development, but that was primarly Oracle database/ERP stuff. Still, in those days I lived by the Visual SlickEdit environment which is also part of the reason why I bought that IDE package for our OS/2 platform when it was still available. It is discontinued now and sadly they will not opensource it (I asked repeatedly but was told that was not a possibility).

In my case that is the setup I have to support multiple C/C++ compiler environments. The best part of it is due to the fact that a VSE (VisualSlickEdit) project can be configured as based on a particular compiler toolset. So today I have the following: GCC and IBM C/C++ 3.6.5. Even if you were looking to have multiple GCC releases (like the old trusty 4.9.x or the newer 9.x) you could define these as well and make sure that your environment is setup correctly. I am actually trying to work through some of that right now, but as it turns out there is never enough time to allocate to these things, so progress is glacialy slow...LOL! 

Othewrise, I think OpenWatcom is a good and matured true IDE, with all the various bells and whistles.

[Dave Yeo]

Should be mentioned that OpenWatcom comes with a nice vi implementation, even runs and shows colours in meshell
Edit, my mistake, meshell opens a vio window for it.