Status of CPOC

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This section summarises the current status of CPOC.

The CPOC system is not yet on full release. The following gives information about CPOC categorised by the system that is being used to host it.

All variants
Development of all major components is completed.
- Header files have been released.
  These cover both the ANSI set, much of Posix and the Psion specific libraries. These header files are enhanced versions of those available with the Psion C SDK (which have been reused with the permission of Psion). These can be downloaded from this site.
- Test libraries are released.
  This are to enable testing, but they means that you cannot link any rela programs unless you provide your own libraries and associated start-up module.
- ANSI standard library is largely completed.
  We have under test a nearly complete implementation of the ANSI standard library - the only major omission being the fact that we do not provide any sort of signal handling. The part that is not quite complete is the start-up module that initialises the standard C environment.
  Also, we have an implementation of some of the commonest POSIX interfaces (e.g read(), write(), etc) as these are needed to support the ANSI level library routines.
  Finally, we have implementations of some of the commonest Psion specific PLIB routines as these are used to support the above libraries, and map them onto the EPOC operating system.
  It is looking increasingly likely that we will not find the time (or interest) to complete this phase. We have therefore made the source available so that anyone particularily interested can take this work to completion.
Psion 3a/3c version
The CPOC front-end (v0.93) has been released to run directly on the Psion 3a/3c. The pre-processor, compiler, assembler, linker and librarian have been released for use with this version of CPOC. The following restrictions apply due to memory restriction of the EPOC operating system:
- The compiler has no support for floating point, and some of the more esoteric warnings are not issued.
- Only small files can be compiled
This is fully functional (except for any bugs!).
Barring the restrictions mentioned above, these are all fully functional and can be downloaded from this site.
The source to this program is now made available to interested users. Note that you need access to the SIBO C SDK to be able to make use of this source (and without the documentation it will probably not make much sense).
Windows 95/NT
The cross-compilation system has been released for use on Windows 95/Windows NT. This includes the same programs as in the Psion 3a/3c variant, except that the CPOC front-end has been replaced by the CPOC_CC command line front-end.
Note that this variant of CPOC does does not suffer the limitations mentioned for the 3a/3c version regarding support for floating point, and does not have the same limits on source file size.
These are all fully functional and can be downloaded from this site
Linux
The cross-compilation system has been released for use on Linux. This includes the same programs as in the Psion 3a/3c variant, except that the CPOC front-end has been replaced by the CPOC_CC command line front-end.
Note that this variant of CPOC does does not suffer the limitations mentioned for the 3a/3c version regarding support for floating point, and does not have the same limits on source file size.
These are all fully functional and can be downloaded from this site. If there are no Linux binaries available for download, then they can easily be built from the source archives that are available for download.

The net effect of the above is that the current release can only really be used for syntax checking (unless you are only using the system for writing Assembler and not C). However the full release should not be far of now (although I have said that before and been proved wrong!). This means it will be of limited use to many potential users, but it is enough to give you a feel for what the final version of CPOC will look like.

Once we have got the initial set of libraries out, it then becomes an incremental process of steadily upgrading the library support to add additional functions. You can therefore expect regular updates (probably at about 4-6 week intervals) of the libraries. These update releases will each add additional functions to the libraries (as well as fix any bugs found in previous releases).

Further cross-compilation variants of CPOC targeting other operating systems will depend on what collaborators can achieve. A number of people have expressed interest in porting the CPOC cross-compilation version of CPOC to other operating systems, although as far as I know no-one has actually done any work yet. The ones that are currently under consideration for additional ports are:

Atari ST
Amiga
Apple MAC
MSDOS
OS/2

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