#Lattice & Manx Flame
2 messages in this thread
I'd say there are two reasons why a 'Turbo-like' product isn't on the
Amiga. First, neither Lattice (er, Sas) or Manx are really anywhere near
as large as Borland is. As such, we simply don't have the amount of
programmers to devote to a project as Phillip does. If the Amiga market
were larger this might be different (either Manx or Lattice would grow, or
a 3rd party would enter), but its rather small compared to the PC market.
Secondly, the integrated environment was originally invented to get around
the PC's limitations. The whole idea was to be able to edit, compile, and
debug without loading and reloading stuff. Well, that all can be done on
the Amiga without an integrated environment, thanx to the miracles of
multitasking and ARexx. Admittedly, Borland has finely honed the
integrated environment, and their debugger is quite a nice piece of
software. But I think you'll start seeing similar progress on the Amiga
soon…
-Mike
I do use Turbo C at work, but I don't use the integrated environment. I use
an editor called Epsilon. At home I use Aztec (which is good, but not in
the same class as TC), and the DME editor. I have looked at the compiler
output from a number of different compilers, and I have to say the best
I've ever seen was from Watcom. With the multi-tasking environment of the
Amiga the integrated environment is a non-issue (in my opinion), BUT I
would love a compiler that generated code that I couldn't easily improve
with the assembler. Some friends have told me that GCC does a fine job on
UNIX systems and I am in contact with a couple of people who are working on
it for the Amiga ( although it is quite large ).
Here is what I would like to see from Aztec: Okay, you've got ANSI, fine.
1) Fix the bugs ASAP. 2) Get some global optomization, make better code. 3)
Do a professional quality source level debugger a-la Turbo. I think the
same should go for Lattice. You have to remember that yes, the Amiga market
is smaller, but there are only two commercial C compilers for the platform!