You may be familiar with the GNU C Compiler from the GNU Project, found on pretty much any Linux distribution. Previously, if you wanted to compile programs using GCC on DOS, you used DJGPP (DJ's GNU Programming Platform) from DJ Delorie. But programs compiled using DJGPP require a 32-bit CPU.

TK Chia has been working to port the GNU C Compiler to DOS, using the ia16 instruction set. While compiling with gcc-ia16 requires a 32-bit CPU, the generated programs will run on any 16-bit CPU. TK Chia recently posted the latest packages for gcc-ia16 at Github. Go grab them!

Mateusz Viste recently released rcal, an interactive calculator for DOS, that loosely mimics the behavior of "roller printing" calculators. It supports huge numbers, floating point and has extremely low hardware requirements. rcal is a 16-bit (real mode) DOS application that needs DOS 3+, an 8086 CPU and around 100 KiB of available conventional RAM. rcal is published under the terms of the MIT license, and relies on the APM math library (1988) by Lloyd Zusman. You can find it at the rcal website at SourceForge.

Some time ago, some developers started an effort to create a 32-bit drop-in replacement for the FreeDOS kernel, called Night Kernel. Note that Night Kernel is still very much in development. Night Kernel will boot but does not yet run DOS programs, and is still a proof of concept. So we won't include Night Kernel in the FreeDOS distribution, at least until it can reliably run classic DOS programs. While Night Kernel is far from their goal, the project has been making steady progress. Interested developers can join their discussion forum or access source code from their Github repo. For more, you can also follow @NightKernel on Twitter.

We've started planning the FreeDOS 1.3 distribution! We previously decided the next release would be an iteration from FreeDOS 1.2. We wanted the next FreeDOS distribution to remain like classic DOS. For example, we won't "retire" any classic commands utilities from Base. But FreeDOS 1.3 is an opportunity to improve and update several things. Our estimated timeline is January 31, 2019.

Please join the freedos-devel email list and contribute to the discussion! Also keep an eye on the FreeDOS Road Map on the FreeDOS Wiki for more updates. Looking for ideas to contribute to FreeDOS? See our Contribute page for several suggestions.

If you're new to FreeDOS, you might wonder what you can do at the command line. On the FreeDOS blog, we recently posted a FreeDOS commands quick-reference guide. This reference shows the most common FreeDOS commands, including a few important notes for new users. If you're looking to take the next step in FreeDOS, here's a handy batch programming quick-reference guide. DOS batch programs are simple scripts that "batch up" several commands into one file.