The History of Djgpp (1998)

DJGPP and the Allegro game library were my first foray into C++ in around 1996-1997 if I recall. Having access to a proper 32-bit protected mode system in DOS (without having to pirate a bunch of other compilers!) was a pretty incredible step forward for the community.

I pretty quickly moved onto building in Win95/98 with MSVC not long after, but I am very grateful to DJ for the compiler and Shawn Hargreaves for Allegro.

DJGPP was foundational for me. It got me into C at an early age, as the second toolchain I spent much time with following Microsoft QuickBasic, and it was my gateway to eventually exploring Linux and Emacs.

I'm sure many others here have similar stories. It was especially valuable to have something like DJGPP back in the mid 90s, when many of us only had access to DOS PCs and compilers were expensive.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39038095 (Jan 2024, 109 comments)

Used this in 1992 for a photon counting imaging system. Worked great.

Needs a "1998" in the title.

According to the linked article, this title I correctly capitalizes djgpp.