john13@garfield.UUCP (05/20/87)
[] The animal exists, and is shipped (at least to here!). I just had a quick couple of minutes to fool with it, and it looks quite impressive although there is the usual compiler trade off of size vs speed. It did upwards of 300 lines/minute when run completely from ram. There is a run-time library that it wants to link into, or if you like you can cause that to be linked totally standalone. It keeps the overlays & libraries it uses in l:, so it kind of needs to be installed on a Workbench (otherwise "can't find ram:"). Speed of the compiled programs is excellent, although I only tested it on a couple (mostly graphics). I'll post benchmarks when I get to look at it more closely. Unfortunately the smallest completely standalone program it can create is >41K unless there are optimization options which I didn't get to. There are several switches, for stuff like "should default arrays be static?" and "should I use 32-bits for everything?". Source code is just a standard ASCII listing of an AmigaBasic program. Program size is under 17K, there are about 70K worth of overlays it may call in, and the libraries (run-time and link-standalone) are 40K each. Not too bad! More when I get a closer look. John