New article series: code reviews

I've been thinking of ways to get new developers interested in working on FreeDOS, or at least contributing to FreeDOS in some way. I recognize that DOS is an old concept for some, and as a result, the way you construct programs for DOS can differ to how you'd construct programs for other operating systems such as Linux.

Sure, programs like Choice and Type and Find and other everyday command-line utilities are pretty straightforward. You'd probably write a DOS Type command in the same way you'd write a Unix ‘cat’ command (using streams). But other programs require different methods.

So I thought some kind of “code review” would be helpful, as a way to demonstrate certain DOS programming methods. I'll plan to examine a FreeDOS program and pull apart a specific function or method or programming trick to show how you can use these methods in your own programs.

It will be easiest for me to do a code review on my own programs, and I may start there. But I will try to explore different FreeDOS programs written by different people, so you can see a variety of methods. Every programmer is different, and this will highlight different ways to implement features or optimize execution or minimize footprint when programming in DOS.

Do you have a program you'd like to highlight? I welcome any guest posts in this series. If you have something you'd like to show off, please email me or leave a comment below. I'd be happy to include your article as a guest post here. (If you submit a guest post, it will be easiest if you can share your contribution under the Creative Commons Sharealike [cc-by] public license.)

What programs or methods would you like to see? If you have a suggestion for a “deep dive” into a FreeDOS utility, let me know! My expertise is C, so I am more likely to do code reviews for programs written in C.