Hi, On Mon, Jan 19, 2026 at 2:38 PM Paul Dufresne via Freedos-devel <[email protected]> wrote: > > First I would like to mention gm2 (GNU Modula-2 compiler), a front-end in GCC > for Modula-2.
It took *years* to get into GCC. I'm quite glad it finally did. > I don't expect a version for DJGPP, but it seems to be now an official > language of GCC: > https://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/frontends.html > https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-13.2.0/gm2.pdf Latest GCC is 15.2, I think? 16 comes probably in April. (DJGPP has 14.2 but no gm2 port yet.) I did recently port some simple code and tested it under Ubuntu 22.04.2 on x86_64 Linux (gm2 11.4). Keep in mind that most Modula-2 compilers are PIM while a few do indeed support ISO. GM2 tries to support both. > After that I would like to mention ACK: Amsterdam Compiler Kit > This is very old, but still slowly maitaned: > https://github.com/davidgiven/ack > A cross-compiler that supports ANSI C, Pascal, Modula 2, Basic for DOS 16 > bits and 32 bits (among many platforms). He has snapshots for Windows, but I don't think the DOS ports are well tested yet. So there are some bugs. I've tried it (intermittently) a few times over the years. > While making it, there was about 10k steps, but work after that (very few > libs however). I actually (also) tested my Modula-2 code with ACK but instead under old Minix 2.0.4 (via DOSMinix under FreeDOS atop FAT16 under VirtualBox.) > But I guess what I consider the most interresting discovery is: FST 4.0 > compiler. Yes, ibiblio (FreeDOS mirror) has that too. I also added my old DJGPP build of M2C. > «Fitted Software Modula-2. last and now free version of the FST-compiler > (4.0). > a good and compact programming-environment (like Turbo Pascal 3.0) for dos. > the compiler isn't ISO-standard. » The ISO standard (ISO 10514) was late in 1996 and somewhat unpopular. It did standardize libraries, but it also added complex numbers, exceptions, and did a few other odd things. > This is a DOS 16 bit compiler for Modula-2. > The IDE is very basic. You're not forced to use the editor. You can batch compile from cmdline instead. > It produce .exe in huge model (suppose to be able to do large too. The smartlinker can omit some unused code if you use "m2link /o". (I know you didn't really mean disk size,but still ....) > For me this is interesting... small but quite powerfull language, not too > many libs... > with .DEF file (equivalent of .h) to learn them (the libs). Keep in mind the context shift from classic Pascal (no linker needed) to Modula-2 (modularity meant for low-level code) and Oberon (merged .def and .mod plus garbage collection and simple OOP). There was also a third-party Modula-3 which GCC used to (unofficially) support, primarily from DEC and former Xerox PARC people. To be honest, a lot of these were somewhat in contrast to the (unnecessary) complexity of Ada. There are several Oberon compilers for DOS too, but most are 32-bit (or need Japheth's HX). In particular, Oberon-M 1.2 supports 8086 / 186 but lacks range checking, floating point, or garbage collection and needs a separate linker. Other than that, I usually use XDS Modula-2 / Oberon or Spivey's Oxford Oberon. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
