William Geiger wrote in a message to Jonathan de Boyne Pollard:

 WG> Well I just talked to Watcom today. They called to let me
 WG> know that v11 has been released.  I inquired what
 WG> enhancements had been made to the OS/2 portion of the
 WG> product. Zip, nada, zero, nothing.

This is untrue.  The way that Watcom compilers work, there is actually a
platform independent core logic generator which is identical for all
supported targets.  For example, v11.0 will provide the same compiler
improvements on OS/2 as it will on Win32, including MMX code generation, P6
optimization, and so forth.  Whether Watcom sales staff understands this is
another matter.

 WG> Watcom used to be an OS/2 friendly vendor but since they were 
 WG> purchased by PowerSoft they have gone to shit. I doubt that we 
 WG> will ever see any more OS/2 support from this company.

In fairness, OS/2 has not been the moving target that Win32 has become, and
it doesn't require compiler vendors to chase it around as the API gets
changed right and left.  IBM has also not made it easy for tools vendors,
and has even broken their own Visual Age products by such actions as
replacing the SOM version in OS/2 as of FixPak 26.  This means that the
OS/2 action is in the libraries, unlike Windows where it is in the front
ends.

 WG> I was looking into using some of their DB products for some 
 WG> client-server work but considering the direction their company 
 WG> is going I am recomending that my clients go with DB/2.

Watcom's database products are fairly primitive and have been falling
further back as times has gone on.  However, this is true of all supported
platforms.

 WG> I really hate this. I hate propritary systems. Due to IBM's 
 WG> mismanagement of OS/2 I am being boxed into a corner of having 
 WG> only one vendor providing the tools I need for my work IBM. 
 WG> Maybe Java can revive OS/2 but it still has miles to go before 
 WG> I would consider it anything more than a toy for developing Web 
 WG> applets.

Platform independent database engines don't exactly seem like the wave of
the future to me.  It has never really been an OS/2 market, but this is
primarily because OS/2 is not especially strong at database serving by
comparison with, say, Unix.  On the other hand, there are people who take
NT seriously as a database server, and that is inexplicable.
 
-- Mike


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