Developing ReactOS with the Community.

[dexdevel]

Hello brothers in the evolution of the operating system,
I personally (you can call me Rod) I am a developer of an operating system based on freeBSD.
I really enjoyed the ReactOS project and I think I can help a lot with the entire community of developers and users, so I would like to incorporate more and understand more about.
In order to develop, we must first understand, so I ask all of you to help with to help me get on the rail project.

Questions:
1-How does it work (exe) applications and other windows executables on reactOS?
2-How are composed and written the reactOS libraries and dlls.
3-In general, how the system works, its development, the use and installation of windows applications?
So... i'm waiting for replies... Thanks for your attention!

[jonaspm]

most of ReactOS dlls and libraries are obtained from Wine-HQ project, since these two are linked
ReactOS is build with RosBe (ReactOS Build Environment)


Hope this helps a little

[EmuandCo]

RosBE is a mingw32 GCC 4.4.2 and will be replaced by a mingw-w64 one in the future. You can use msvc, too by generating the needed project files with the included cmake we use.

[iPick12]

It's great that you want to start developing for the ReactOS project. Thus, I 've compiled a list of the basic things you should be aware of:
1. ReactOS uses the PE executable format (.exe) and not the ELF-i386 that is used in UNIX-based systems (as far as I know).
2. Most DLL's contain API functions implementations and not drivers, drivers usually have the .SYS extension.
3. To allow Win32 applications to run on ReactOS, it emulates the Win32 subsystem with the (huge) Win32 API.
4. I think you are already familiar on how to use SVN. If you're not, check out the development Wiki, about getting a source code copy.

For more information it's a good idea to see the MSDN documentation.
It provides a much better documentation of the Win32 architecture than the ReactOS docs.

Good luck with programming!

[DOSGuy]

ReactOS uses the PE executable format (.exe) and not the ELF-i386 that is used in UNIX-based systems (as far as I know).

That's because it's not a Unix/Linux-based operating system. I'm hoping that it will eventually support NE executables, perhaps by implementing WoW.