BARRETT@owl.ecil.iastate.edu (Marc Barrett) (08/02/90)
A C compiler called the 'Greenhill' compiler is mentioned repeatedly
in the various issues of AmigaMail. Is this the official C compiler
used internally at Commodore? I thought that Commodore had unofficially
adopted the Lattice compiler for internal work?
BTW, AmigaOS2.0 was rewritten entirely in C. What compiler was used
for AmigaOS 2.0?
-MB-toebes@unx.sas.com (John Toebes) (08/08/90)
In article <26403@snow-white.udel.EDU> BARRETT@owl.ecil.iastate.edu (Marc Barrett) writes: > > A C compiler called the 'Greenhill' compiler is mentioned repeatedly >in the various issues of AmigaMail. Is this the official C compiler >used internally at Commodore? I thought that Commodore had unofficially >adopted the Lattice compiler for internal work? > > BTW, AmigaOS2.0 was rewritten entirely in C. What compiler was used >for AmigaOS 2.0? > > -MB- THe compiler that you are referring to is the GreenHills compiler. They produce cross compilers for generic 68000 implementations (with some customization). The code quality from it is quite good and the compiler is fairly respected in the industry. The biggest problem is that it does not run on the Amiga native. Commodore was running it cross from a VAX or a SUN. Commodore has always expressed a desire to move toward native development. Both Aztec and Lattice were given a chance to recompile the layers library code to compare for size to the GreenHills generated code. Our compiler was able to hold its own against the existing code. For the 2.0 version of the operating system, many pieces were rewritten using the 5.05 version of the Lattice C compiler. SAS Institute provided direct support to Commodore on this project and as a result Commodore was able to successfully utilize the compiler. All of the C: commands, dos.library, gadtools.library and workbench are written in Lattice C utilizing the #pragma interface (for which Steve Krueger almost lost his hair supporting :-) our __asm tricks and several blink tricks. Some pieces are written in assembler for speed (or where they absoluetely had to squeeze a few more bytes). Commodore is interested in fast efficient code as well as development native on the Amiga. Rom space is at a premium. You can be assured that they are constantly asking for code generation improvements (and getting them) to help reduce the rom space requirements. From our standpoint it has been quite enjoyable to see our product used in such an endeavor (not to mention our gratitude to Commodore for their assistance in helping to drive the product to a higher level of robustness). None of this is to say that they couldn't (or wouldn't) switch if they found a compiler that could produce better compatible code. /*---------------------All standard Disclaimers apply---------------------*/ /*----Working for but not officially representing SAS Institute Inc.------*/ /*----John A. Toebes, VIII usenet:toebes@dev.sas.com------*/ /*------------------------------------------------------------------------*/