User avatar
codevark
Sutton, MA USA

Posted Thu Feb 04, 2021 1:16 pm

Heya! My first coding experience was on an A1000 in 1985, using (IIRC) Lattice C. Later moved onto more high-level/scripty stuff like CanDO and ARexx. Any coders out there? What's the best compiler to use these days? Just snagged Oosterkamp's book. :)

codevark

User avatar
codevark
Sutton, MA USA

Posted Thu Feb 04, 2021 3:46 pm

hmm.. looks like the book assumes OS3.9 right from the start, as it describes downloading the NDK for 3.9. Guess I'll look into that. :)

User avatar
sikosis
Brisbane, Australia

Posted Thu Feb 04, 2021 5:59 pm

I'm not sure what the best is, but I've been dabbling with SAS C 6.5 which can be found here.

I wish I knew about C when I was on the Amiga as I only ever did stuff in BASIC, then Hi-Soft Pascal but also played around with CanDO as well. Nowadays I mainly program in PHP, C# and Objective-C on Macs and PCs.

User avatar
codevark
Sutton, MA USA

Posted Thu Feb 04, 2021 6:56 pm

Maybe it was SAS C, and not Lattice - sounds familiar. Thanks for the link! CanDo could have been a killer app if things were to have gone differently. It was basically the early Amiga equivalent of the later (PC) Delphi (another language I have a lot of experience in, long story) - Eddie Churchill who was a CanDo dev went to work for Borland and contributed to Delphi.. and so history is written, winding its way through our lives. I'm working on getting an old website of mine "CanDo Corral" back up and accessible. Hopefully before summer. :)

User avatar
BloodyCactus
Lexington VA

Posted Fri Feb 05, 2021 6:21 pm

cross compiling with VBCC is imo the best way.

User avatar
grshaw

Posted Sun Feb 07, 2021 1:28 am

Maybe it was SAS C, and not Lattice - sounds familiar
SAS and Lattice C are the same product IIRC. I believe that it was first known as Lattice C and then later re-branded to SAS C. I also learnt to code in C on using Lattice C.

User avatar
JoeUser
Dallas, TX

Posted Sat Mar 13, 2021 8:23 am

codevark wrote:
Thu Feb 04, 2021 6:56 pm
Maybe it was SAS C, and not Lattice - sounds familiar. Thanks for the link! CanDo could have been a killer app if things were to have gone differently. It was basically the early Amiga equivalent of the later (PC) Delphi (another language I have a lot of experience in, long story) - Eddie Churchill who was a CanDo dev went to work for Borland and contributed to Delphi.. and so history is written, winding its way through our lives. I'm working on getting an old website of mine "CanDo Corral" back up and accessible. Hopefully before summer. :)
Now, dabbling in CanDo sounds interesting to me, as I recently picked up a complete package. But, it seemed a little limiting, from an initial scan of the manual (simply creating many "hyper-card"-like canned windows from templates). Haven't dug down too deeply in it yet, to see just how much customization of code is possible. Anyway, it was interesting enough to add to my software collection to play with some day.

I'd be interested to view your resurrected site, please post progress updates!

User avatar
codevark
Sutton, MA USA

Posted Thu Mar 18, 2021 1:32 pm

Thanks for the infos! I'll check out vbcc, as it seems to be fairly recent/maintained.

CanDo is deeper than it first looks. If you can manage to find a copy of the CanDo SDK, it gets deeper - you can actually create self-modifying decks. Apparently AX1 does this trick under the hood, but the SDK opens up this capability to the casual user. As I mentioned, the biggest limitation is the inability to access system libraries. TBS, you can still do an awful lot with the base pkg. (If we only had the source code!)

I have a list of things to do a mile long, and getting the Corral back on line is one of them. First I need to get my brain back into webdev mode after quite a long period of doing just about everything else. :)

User avatar
Tim NZ
New Zealand

Posted Sat Jul 31, 2021 2:05 am

I'm just getting back in to programming my A500 at the moment, using FOSS and Public Domain compilers (that is, I'm intentionally avoiding more proprietary options). Here's what I've found works well so far.

Fred Fish disk 508 has what I think is the most recent (ha!) Sozobon C compiler, named HCC. It also includes A68k and blink. I happened to still have a floppy of Commodore's 1.2 include files, and HCC is happy to work with those. This works really well, and is what I'm mostly playing with. Old-fashioned K&R C is part of its retro charm ;)

If you have some kind of mass-storage device, another nice (but huge) one is ADE, which includes an entire GNU working environment (...a lot of which is handy in general, not just for C programming - e.g. stuff like sh, find, grep, awk, sed, diff, head, tail, ...). It's pretty jolly awesome, and feels just like my regular GNU/Linux environment (well, without screen or tmux, though I guess either of those could be got running). It even manages to feel reasonably quick on my Amiga. The down-side is, because it's so familiar (i.e. a bit boring), I haven't played around with it much. Anyway, I have compiled a few command line progs to check that things actually work, and they do. I haven't tried compiling anything Amiga-library-specific using ADE yet, but it should be doable.

(By the way, the ADE package I linked to above didn't support my A500's 68000 by default. To get it going I had to copy ixemul-000.library and ixnet-000.library from ixemul-48.0 to ADE/Sys/Libs/ixemul.library and ADE/Sys/Libs/ixnet.library, replacing both ADE files respectively. I'm kinda surprised that this worked, since it was just a guess. It might cause problems I haven't noticed yet. But anyway - so far, so good.)

Update, 2021-08-18: Since I wrote that, I've switched to using mostly ADE. It does work well, including its support for Amiga-specific libraries. (I found HCC fine for small projects, but it's a little rough around the edges; larger projects were a bit painful to debug.)
Last edited by Tim NZ on Wed Aug 18, 2021 12:26 am, edited 4 times in total.

User avatar
mscdex

Posted Sat Jul 31, 2021 6:17 am

Another option is gcc/g++ 6.5 (with some additional optimizations for the Amiga) here. The author also has various other Amiga-related development projects on Github that may be of interest.





Return to “Software”