About GCC/PM                                       11/5/95
   by Martin Glass (e1403346@watt.lab.eese.bee.qut.edu.au)
----------------------------------------------------------

  GCC/PM will be a partial recode of GCC/2 (much thanks to Colin Jensen, see
GCC/2 note at end) with a focus on developing PM applications, with some
support remaining for developing command line programs.

  It is intended to be used by beginners (or otherwise) who wish to have a
look at the general style of coding PM applications, but who do not wish
to sink $100's into a commercial C compiler (or cannot afford to), just to find
that OS/2 PM is not what they wanted/expected it to be.

  It is currently under development and expressions of interest are desired
from current GCC/2 users and also from anyone who feels that this may be what
they are looking for.  Feature suggestions for this product are also welcome.

  While lacking many of the commercial compilers features (such as an IDE,
debugger, profiler, etc), the compiler and libraries are very stable, and
no problems have yet been encountered that are likely to face the intended
users of GCC/PM.


Current features (GCC/2) include:
--------------------------------

o C/C++ compiler (command line)
o Make utility (command line)
o .DLL creation
o statically/dynamically linked .EXE's
o full 32-bit object code


Additional features developed/proposed for GCC/PM:
-------------------------------------------------

o PM interface to C compiler (no C++ support at present)
  - current input file shown with line number
  - status of current processing (pre-processing, compiling,
       assembling, linking)
  - error messages/output messages list-boxes with scrollback
  - option selection with radiobuttons (compile, optimise, link, verbose, etc)
o PM Make utility
  - dependency rules shown
  - dependency tree
  - current input file shown
o command line interface remains (?)
o .LIB creation
o .EXE file size optimisation switches (internal fixups, link386 options)
o smaller .EXE size using PM-oriented library
o concurrent pre-processing, compiling and assembling.

All suggestions, comments and improvements on the above list are welcomed.

GCC/PM is completely OS/2 (PM) orientated, with other OS support code being
removed entirely.

* GCC/2 is a port of GCC, similar to EMX, developed by Colin Jensen, and is
covered by the GNU General Public License (as will be GCC/PM).  GCC/PM uses
most of the current GCC/2 codebase.
