🚀 go-pugleaf

Greetings -

One of my clients is using a software development environment that has
not been updated in five years. They've asked me to evaluate the
current state of development tools and recommend a new environment.

The environment supports the development of a line of MS-DOS based
realtime data acquisition and analysis products. The current products
must operate on machines all the way back to the PC/XT. In other words,
at this time, and for the forseeable future, they must operate in real
mode.

One of the problems they face today is "ram cram"; they are running out
of the 640K address space. The good news is that the products are very
modular in design. It looks like the use of overlays will help the
situation. An overlay manager that can make use of expanded or extended
memory -- if available in the machine -- would be of great interest.

The current product line has been shipping since 1988 and needs to live
until the next generation can be developed. They are not planning to
start design on the next generation until sometime in late 1993. At
that time, the slate will be wiped clean. Any development tool set they
select needs to be robust enough to support whatever they may dream up.


Currently, they are using the following set of tools for their
development:

	Microsoft C version 5.1
	Microsoft Assembler version 5.1
	Microsoft Linker version <whatever shipped with C 5.1>
	Homebrew MAKE utility derived from NDMAKE
	No configuration control

(Traditionally, they have only had one engineer working on the products
at any given time. For contractural reasons, they have to take source
code snapshots at every release of each product. Between releases,
there has been no real need for change control.)


They have asked me to evaluate and recommend replacements for all of the
above. I would appreciate any comments about any of the following tools,
or any others that I may not have listed.

	C compiler - Microsoft C/C++ version 7.0 or Borland C/C++

	Assembler - Microsoft or Borland. (Possibly needs to match
							 the C compiler?)

	Linker - RTlink, Blinker

	MAKE or other build utility - Polymake

	Configuration control - PVCS
	

Please reply by Email. I need to summarize whatever I find out, from the
net and other sources, for my client. I'll post my findings here.

Thanks!

--- Tom
Tom Allebrandi			Allebrandi@Ipact.Com
TA Software Systems		(alternate: Allebrandi@Inland.Com)