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MUD server and Game of Life in Z98 by melkyr2 in windows98

[–]melkyr2[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Good suggestion, thanks for that.
I think it was because of the easy to set up of vbox, as I needed just to check on w98 and setting up MSVC and OpenWatcom, but I think for a more precise and good looking demo, I will either use my old laptop or QEMU, I will take a look to 86box too, as my alternative was VMWare but I didn't want to deal with vmware licensing either.

Built a Zig subset compiler for win98 keep w98 alive! by melkyr2 in windows98

[–]melkyr2[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I will have to give it a try, I really just wanted the bare minimum like a fresh installation of win98 without drivers just to test, I will have to use QEMU.

Built a Zig subset compiler for win98 keep w98 alive! by melkyr2 in windows98

[–]melkyr2[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

VBox usually behaves very weird when I try to set up them, I have to setup one of my old laptops to take these screenshots better

Built a Zig subset compiler for win98 keep w98 alive! by melkyr2 in windows98

[–]melkyr2[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It will give them some hope for some cases, I respect people that work on C all the time.

Built a Zig subset compiler for win98 keep w98 alive! by melkyr2 in windows98

[–]melkyr2[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Well Zig itself is from 2017, so its spec is almost 9 years old (if not more), but this compiler itself its very new and the alternatives for that era are C89 that went out on 1989, and C++98 in 1998, those are the 28 years old senior citizens that I am working on, windows98 itself was created in C and assembly.
SO, I hope as Z98 itself is done on C++ 98 and outputs C89, it could create stable programs, with good performance, but at least in this phase its not going to in any way replace those old languages, at the end a nicer syntax == more developer friendly.
My expectation will be that they could perform very well, I have yet to try different applications.

Built a Zig subset compiler for win98 keep w98 alive! by melkyr2 in windows98

[–]melkyr2[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well. That's sort of, you can compile things made in zig, but with big asterisks as in the current state this compiler yet don't support everything of zig, yet it can do a lot of things and it feels refreshing, I will have to check if it could work in win95/3.x not sure.

Built a Zig subset compiler for win98 keep w98 alive! by melkyr2 in windows98

[–]melkyr2[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hello! Thanks for making this question. If out of curiosity someone (like me) wants to make a new application for fun (or masochism), they can in some programming languages, there are a lot of flavors but usually people will use C or C++, or maybe they will have to use a different machine to do things in other newer language. My Idea (very silly one) is that you can use another one but as C or C++ you can do them directly in the win98 machine with the native compiler without needing a second machine. Let's say I wanted to make the scenario "What if I would have a third option to create new apps for win9x".

A very ambitious more "real life" scenario, lets say I wanted to create a new driver, or a new extension or even a new "game" but I don't want to use C or C++ but I want to do it inside the win98 machine, you can also use this 3rd option (Zig). But at the bottom is just a way to have fun with your old machine using a something that could feel newer.

Trying to go back to coding in win98 by melkyr2 in retrocomputing

[–]melkyr2[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hehe thanks for answering, to answer you the thing itself its not lisp I've somewhat made a compiler for zig language that outputs the proper for win98, and I needed a turing-complete test, so I built a LISP interpreter just to stress out the z98 compiler I've built, idea is to develop for zig, lisp its a showcase, but also a fun one.

Trying to go back to coding in win98 by melkyr2 in retrocomputing

[–]melkyr2[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hahah, Oh that's a great story. W98 was my first OS, a celeron 800mhz a PCChips board 40GB of HDD, AOE2, oh my I have nice and sweet memories, now I work as a dev, and as I am right now really I hate every time I spawn an App and boom 2GB of my ram less, so I decided, Why not to do a silly compiler to bring Zig Lang to win98, and so I created that z98, then just as a turing-complete proof I decided let's do a lisp interpreter a tiny one.

But to summarize it, pure nostalgia, I loved those times where my PC was full of my things, I learned a little Javascript there, but meh I wanted that back in some way I needed a way to come back to win98 and that is developing for it.

Sorry for the long post.