XT 5160

[John Foust]

At 10:25 PM 5/6/2005, Ethan Dicks wrote:
>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).

I'm not remembering this sort of malloc() bug.  Are you thinking
of something with the AmigaDOS AllocMem()/FreeMem() calls?  Or something
in a particular C compiler's library?  I can see how a particularly
poorly written C application that never checked malloc()'s return
value could crash if it wrote to a null pointer.

What will be humbling is that when we find the answer, we will
find it in an article that I wrote in the 80s.  :-)  I've been meaning
to put all my old Amazing Computing articles online.

- John