#388 Slow compile times with BorlandC++3.1

[Anonymous]

First time user. This has been nothing but miserable for me. Did get it installed on a Dell Vostro 2510 circa 2009 with nvidia graphics card. BorlandC++3.1 is unusable due to compile speeds that are 100s of times slower instead of a few seconds which is normal. Tried many games in GAMES directory, nearly all fail with hard error "press esc to exit" resulting in immediate hard reboot or system lock requiring power switch reboot.Tried all of the boot modes - no joy.
This has taken hours of my time and given nothing back. It seems to be broken on so many levels.
What am I missing?

[fritz.mueller]

Did you really try version 1.2 of FreeDOS installation CD? Or which version (you did not mention it) If yes, I can understand you a little. I also had to be tricky to make 1.2 work.
But meanwhile FreeDOS test version FDT2311 (version 1.3 with a lot of updates) Live CD is out,
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/test/ and it should work much better (among others: NLS, national language support for many commands, new fdisk and several other tools were updated.
As I am no programmer I cannot tell you if BorlandC is usable now. But the games should work.
In case that network should work (is shown when it works, I must admit that it doesn't run on my 2005 laptop) you can run fdnpkg search to add programs or to update them.
Other - and maybe quicker way to test it is running it in a virtual machine, then network should work too.
So give FDT2311 a try.

[Jim Hall]

As Fritz asked, please verify if you used FreeDOS 1.2, or if you used FreeDOS 1.3 (the latest version). Also note we release new test versions, usually available each month; you could also try that. But the kernel hasn't changed in the monthly test releases, so I don't expect anything different there.

We are aware that some NVIDIA graphics cards may not support classic VGA modes anymore, so that could be the issue with the games not running. (If they are unable to start VGA mode, they will immediately exit.)

I'm surprised to hear that Borland C/C++ Compiler was slow. I've found the IDE interface is slow in Borland TurboC with FreeDOS (haven't looked into why) so it might be the same with the IDE in Borland C/C++. But you said "compile speeds that are 100s of times slower" so that implies you tried to compile something from the command line (?) and the Borland C Compiler itself was slow.

Please install the OpenWatcom C Compiler (in the FreeDOS distribution) and try that for comparison. It would be very helpful to compile the same source file with both OpenWatcom and Borland from the command line (not the IDE) to compare each. For example, this "Hello world" program:

#include <stdio.h>

int
main(void) {
  puts("Hello world");
  return 0;
}

[Anthony Williams]

I've found the IDE interface is slow in Borland TurboC with FreeDOS (haven't looked into why) so it might be the same with the IDE in Borland C/C++.

I believe we discovered that the Borland IDEs are noticeably slower when FDAPM (APMDOS??) is loaded.

[Jim Hall]

(updated title to be more useful)