XT 5160

Ethan Dicks ethan.dicks at gmail.com
Fri May 6 22:25:20 CDT 2005


On 5/6/05, John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com> wrote:
> Compiling on early Amigas was a real pain.

Any floppy-based C compiler is a pain.  It's worse on early Amigas
because malloc() would guru the OS rather than return a null pointer
(not the C compiler's fault - the lowest level memory allocation
routine in the kernel did it).  It gave rise to a lot of old software
that would *never* fly in the UNIX world because AmigaDOS 1.0 and 1.1
developers assumed that if malloc() returned, the pointer *must* be
valid.  Not a safe assumption on a machine that doesn't have virtual
memory (and not that safe when you _do_ have virtual memory, either).

-ethan



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