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486 points ethanpil | 2 comments | 25 Jun 25 00:07 UTC | HN request time: 3.038s | source
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jksmith ◴[25 Jun 25 01:21 UTC] No.44372826[source]▶
This is just a "because I wanted to" project. And I get that; done a lot of those myself just to understand what the hell was going on. But the rewrite of turbo vision into FPC and compiling to half a dozen targets has been around for 20 years. Turbo vision is probably the best text mode windowing library in existence. The cool fun kicks in when you can map a whole text screen to an array like so: var Screen: Array[1..80,1..25] Of Byte Absolute $B800; // or something like that as i recall

What turbo vision brought to the game was movable, (non) modal windows. Basically a lot of rewriting that array in a loop. Pretty snappy. I made a shitload of money with that library.

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dleslie ◴[25 Jun 25 02:47 UTC] No.44373230[source]▶
For those curious, here is a modern port of the C++ Turbo Vision that also supports Unicode:

https://github.com/magiblot/tvision

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san1927 ◴[25 Jun 25 08:29 UTC] No.44374924[source]▶
lmao is any body still using turbo cpp?
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1. dleslie ◴[25 Jun 25 16:25 UTC] No.44379085[source]▶
OpenWatcom is the preferred choice of those still writing DOS applications, but there are those that still use Turbo C++ for the nostalgia.
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2. iforgotpassword ◴[25 Jun 25 18:20 UTC] No.44380337[source]▶
Oh, a few years ago I wanted to write a simple program for dos. Since this is a Linux-only household otherwise, I was delighted to see OpenWatcom has a Linux port. I spent a good half hour trying to get a simple first version of the program I wanted to write running, but it always crashed right away. I simplified more and more until I basically arrived at hello world. On a hunch I ran the windows version of OpenWatcom with wine, and lo and behold, the program ran flawlessly! Once I googled that I found a couple of forum threads where people went like "yeah sure the Linux port produces broken binaries" because of course.

It's never the compiler until it's the compiler. Just didn't expect it during some simple fun coding at home. :)