On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 9:55 PM, Hans-Peter Diettrich <[email protected]> wrote: > > Right, but it was the first desktop presented by Microsoft. >
No it wasn't. GEM was presented by Digital Research, Microsoft had nothing to do with it. > > I'm not sure what GEM has to do with multitasking. > You said that they were technically similar, which isn't the case. Multitasking was an example of a major technical difference they had. > > I don't see a need for an special Windows compiler. The only requirement is > a linker that links the resources into the executable. This was a separate > program for a long time, in addition to the compiler and linker. > Windows (Win16) executables are a different format and while a linker *could* do it, a windows-aware compiler is still needed. The Win16 calling convention is (was) different to whatever DOS compilers used (usually compilers used their own). Windows was doing software-based virtual memory management and would unload parts of the program by unloading functions and patching the memory where the function was make a system call for loading them back (so running code that tried to call the function would continue to work). The compiler had to know about that do make proper prologs and epilogs. Also AFAIK callbacks required special handling too. Some notes are given in http://www.openwatcom.org/index.php/Exploring_Windows_3.x but that is mostly Win3.x specific. There some notes about Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.0 in Raymond Chen's "the old new thing" blog, but i can't find specifics right now. -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
