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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Not on 8 bit machines, no. Look at what Perl did with C in that timeframe though, and it's true for a different subset of machines.

Within Perl 1.0, part of the Configure script, you can see the list of machines it could build on here: https://github.com/kaworu/perl1/blob/ba165bbde4eef698ff9cc69...

  attrlist="mc68000 sun gcos unix ibm gimpel interdata tss os mert pyr"
  attrlist="$attrlist vax pdp11 i8086 z8000 u3b2 u3b5 u3b20 u3b200"
  attrlist="$attrlist ns32000 ns16000 iAPX286 mc300 mc500 mc700 sparc"

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Not even on 16 bit home machines, which is why any serious game, or winning demoscene entries, were written in Assembly, until we reached the days of 486 and DOS extenders.

As a read through the Amiga and PC literature of the time will show.

The problem here is much more the unix wars and a lack of confidence in BSD under legal fire rather than a lack of ability. The principal concern of unix vendors of the early PC era was to maintain their market share in mini and mainframe product sectors rather than growth into the consumer market. This spurred a rewrite of BSD fragments tied to the legacy unix codebase which fully portablized C and the GCC downstream projects which ended up benefiting the weird hobby OS linux disproportionately, and had it not had to be written from scratch we may have ended up with a wonderful 286-BSD rather than a 486-BSD, which at the time was still not fully clean room foss and unburdened. This was a time when large customers of OS products were trying to squeeze all the performance juice out of the existing systems instead of looking at new paradigms. We have things like the full SAST and warn-free release of sunOS around this time, where Sun was focused on getting a rock stable platform to then optimize around rather than efforts to produce products for the emerging Micro market. We can see that the concept of a portable unix system and c library as early as Xenix on the Apple Lisa in 1984. That's only 3 short years after the IBM collaboration for PC-DOS, showing even a rookie uncoordinated and low technical skill team such as microsoft (Paraphrasing Dave Cutler, chief NT kernel lead - Zachary, G. Pascal (2014). Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft. Open Road Media. ISBN 978-1-4804-9484-8).

Xenix was my introduction to UNIX, I wouldn't claim it would win any performance price, specially when considering graphics programming.

Also my first C book was "A book on C", which had a type in listing for RatC dialect, like many others in those early 1980's, which were nothing more than a plain macro assembler without opcodes, for all practical purposes.

Compiler optimizations in those 8 and 16 bit compilers were what someone nowadays would do in a introduction to compilers, as the bare minimum, like constant propagation and peephole optimizations.

A fair amount of non-game Amiga scene, including the OS, was either BCPL or C.

Sure, when performance didn't matter.

Just like on MS-DOS side, I did plenty of stuff on Turbo BASIC, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C (quickly replaced by Turbo C++), and Clipper, until Windows 3.x and OS/2 came to be.

Small utilities, or business applications, without big resources demands.

Or, where portability did matter. That was still true much later...web servers were often mostly C, then inline ASM for the SSL parts.

By then we were already in Windows 95 and Windows NT territory, with OS/2 still waving on the side, and game developers being shown the door to WinG, DirectX's percusor.

>BCPL

Was used by some parts of AmigaDOS (dos.library) and it is unfortunate.

AFAIK nothing third party uses BCPL.

Dungeon Master (1987) on the Atari ST was mostly written in C.

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