[fpc-devel] FPC for Sanos (a minimal Win-32)

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Pierre Free Pascal wrote:
>   I looked a little on the API declared by Sanos
> and I think that it would probably be easier
> to use our Unix targets to get a reasonable support
> for this OS rather than trying to use the Win32 subset.
>   The C API seems to be far more extended than
> the small Win32 emulation layer.
> 
>   Otherwise you will really need to strip the RTL down a lot:
> Do not rely on exported function in DLL's
> looking into sources, you will discover that lots
> are only pseudo implementations doing nothing.
>  
>   See for instance
> SetConsoleCtrlHandler implementation in:
> http://www.jbox.dk/sanos/source/win32/kernel32/kernel32.c.html
> 
> SetConsoleCtrlHandler is the central function
> used inside Windows RTL to support exceptions on that target...
> Using signals.pp unit might help for this particular problem
> as thread specific exceptions with thread information block
> seems to be supported (but I didn't test it).

I'm tinkering with it at present. If I can get it to the point where an 
empty program "runs" then I'll be happy for the moment, if it runs a 
Hello World which also runs on Windows then I'll consider it time well 
spent.

I don't intend to put much effort into this since I don't know whether 
Sanos really is useful for anything, but I think it has potential as an 
upgrade for DOS+Go32. After all, if somebody wants a unix-style OS 
there's plenty of cut-down Linuxes.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]