Yet another Hacker News

The History of Djgpp (1998)

31 points atan2 5 days ago 9 comments

InsideOutSanta 1 hour ago | parent

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

urbnspacecowboy 1 hour ago | parent

DJGPP's author has some funny ideas about spelling and capitalization, including his own name, DJ Delorie (not "D. J." or the like). I guess it's his own personal "no brown M&M's" rule!

readthenotes1 1 hour ago | parent

Or it's just an artifact of neurodivergence

kelnos 58 minutes ago | parent

> funny ideas about spelling and capitalization, including his own name, DJ Delorie (not "D. J." or the like)

If you read his about page, "DJ" is his legal name, as-is, with no spaces. It's not an initialism or abbreviation for something else.

Regardless, it's a little weird to criticize someone for how they spell their name. By definition, their name is spelled how they want it. It's a core component of identity.

Dwedit 1 hour ago | parent

Needs a "1998" in the title.

martinclayton 1 hour ago | parent

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

JimDabell 1 hour ago | parent

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

dafelst 1 hour ago | parent

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.

mshroyer 41 minutes ago | parent

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.