User:PeterC

From Open Watcom

About Me

Professionally I lead a double life. On one hand I teach computer engineering technology at Vermont Technical College. Yet I also play the role of a student at the University of Vermont where I am slowly working towards an advanced degree in computer science.

My interest in Watcom starts quite a few years ago. At Vermont Technical College we used the old commerical compiler as our C and C++ compiler of choice in our classes during the early to mid-1990s. When support for the commericial product ended we were forced to switch to other compilers. Yet when Watcom became Open Watcom I got interested in using the compiler again in my teaching because it is a nice, complete product (lots of tools) that our students can install on their own machines for free. Also, unlike the gcc derivatives, Open Watcom provides a more native experience under Windows. In addition we started using MS-DOS as an embedded operating system in one of our classes and Open Watcom was a reasonably choice to support that class as well.

Unfortunately the old Watcom compiler had fallen rather far behind in terms of C++ standards conformance making it impossible to use it in its initial state given the way our classes had evolved since the mid-1990s. It was for this reason that I started working on Open Watcom; I wanted to help modernize the product---particularly the C++ compiler and libraries---so that it could serve our educational purposes.

My contribution to the project has so far mostly focused on building a fresh implementation of the Standard Template Library for Open Watcom. Although there remains much work to be done, I'm happy to say that "OWSTL" (not to mention the C++ compiler itself... largely thanks to Christof) has almost reached a point where we can now teach our data structures course using Open Watcom. That's progress!

--PeterC 18:35, 14 December 2005 (PST)