On Tue, 16 Jun 2026, Aaron Wohl via Freedos-devel wrote:
I did something similar, a full C23 C compiler targeting freedos.
See https://github.com/avwohl/uc386
It does global optimization; you can put all the .c files on the command
line. It does dead code elimination for all your source and unused
parts of the libraries. It passes the fujitsu and other test suites.
It builds the GNU utilies and gawk, and the current micropython
https://github.com/avwohl/freedos_micro_python . Micropython has the
ssl, ssh, and http libraries with sample programs in python for wget,
scp, and sftp working.
On the morality, CLAUDE is listed as a contributor. I did prod it in
the right direction. I used to work for the PQCC (production quality
compiler) project at Carnegie Mellon back in the early 1980s. So I
think I had some influence on the outcome.
C23 for protected mode and C99 for real mode are definitely different
beasts. Real mode 8088 requires a lot of special adaptation and still
limits you pretty severely; this is probably why the only open-source
compiler that even comes close to one of the traditional commercial
compilers is, well, one of the traditional commercial compilers. (i.e.,
OpenWatcom)
In fact, that's why I wanted to do this in the first place. Right now,
you have a bunch of toy compilers, something that's trying to be more but
isn't particularly (ia16-gcc), and the behemoth known as Watcom, plus MSC
5.1, Turbo C 2.01 and Turbo C++ 1.01 if freeware's good enough.
The libc is probably the least clanky bit - apart from startup code, it's
all either "that's the only sane way to do it" or something with provable
provenance (usually BSD, but I did provide some suggestions).
-uso.
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