papa@bacall.UUCP (Marco Papa) (12/23/86)
In message <2232@bacall.UUCP>, I write: > I just got Lattice 3.10 which is now packaged with Blink. Unfortunatly, > due to the bugs in the handling of overlays in Blink, is basically of no > use to me. The manual says that the OVERLAY directive IS supported and > the readme file mentions no problems with it. I received a call today from John Meissen of Lattice, Inc. concerning the problems I experienced with the overlay linker supplied with Lattice Amiga C 3.10. If you were at the Developer's Conference, you might remember that John gave one of the talks, "Standardization of C, and C as a development language". Anyway, he confirmed that overlays do not work with the current version of Blink from the Software Distillery, but the are fixing it now. John was busy building the "alink-compatible" libraries for me, so that I can use overlays before BLINK is fixed. Very nice. He gave me the scoop on why they had to switch to BLINK. They asked Commodore to modify Alink to support base-relative addressing (like MANX), but apparently Commodore's contract with Metacompco does not include further modifications like this one. I guess they had no choice, since BLINK was the only other linker available. I am sorry if I was too harsh with Lattice, but I need badly overlays to get my programs to use as little memory as needed. Lattice seems to sincerely consider the problems that users of their products might have, and their help is greatly appreciated. By the way, John is also working on the "Cross" Lattice Amiga C compiler (the one that runs under PC/DOS), which is what I use most of the time (except for creating the last versions from native Lattice Amiga C 3.10 or MANX). -- Marco Papa Felsina Software P.S.: usual disclaimers apply