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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

> Size saving CLI commands

For those unfamiliar with the Amiga culture, it's worth pointing out that this frequently includes shaving bytes off tools. I remember more than once disassembling some CLI utility to strip out a few bytes here and there (seeing the poor, wasteful quality output of early C compilers delayed my switch from asm to higher level languages by at least a couple of years...).

Not just for the sake of saving disk space, but because you'd either make them resident in memory or copy them to a RAM: disk so you could more easily swap floppies and still have your tools available, and when you had 512KB or 1MB of RAM, every little bit made a difference.

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Using something as monstrously bloated and needlessly wasteful as C would never have crossed my mind in those days.

It's fun checking in on the Amiga discussion forums now and again and seeing people still posting hand-optimised versions of standard AmigaOS libraries with additional clock cycles shaved off...

Some of the early code was actually BCPL.

True, hence the horrible BPTR/BSTR types (requiring shifting the pointer two bits). Most of the rest of the OS was written in C, but I think the point was that for a whole lot of us mere users of AmigaOS, writing in C felt horribly inefficient. E.g. the C compilers didn't know about the OS guarantees of which registers would not get clobbered by calls into system libraries, and so would unnecessarily reload the library base address all the time, for example, before considering the lack of all kinds of optimisations in the C compilers most of us had access to.

AmigaOS is beautiful.

dos.library is a pus-filled abscess that simply does not belong anywhere near it.

It is unfortunate they were in a hurry and just tucked tripOS in there.

The ABI also makes you pass said pointers in data registers, unlike other libraries in AmigaOS, instead of address registers, because of course there'd be little point passing them in address registers when they need to be transformed for use. Horrible.

There's additional uglyness elsewhere. Like processes vs tasks, or the IPC ports. It ends up adding overhead, a layer of bad grease on top of exec.library.

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