[Coco] C compiler source

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Mon, 2005-03-14 at 08:51 -0500, James Dessart wrote:
> Earlier in the past 24 hours, John H. said:
> 
> > I guess my point was, why use a one-off emulator for  OS-9 + Level 1
> > when you can run NitrOS-9 under MESS? MESS has the wider audience, so
> > presumably it will get more dev attention, have less bugs, etc.
> > 
> > I think if you can expose a shell prompt through a virtual serial port,
> > that would get you access to the OS-9 shell.
> 
> The point is that MESS emulates the whole system, and is not sufficiently
> fast to be a comfortable development environment. OS-nine emulates OS-9
> system calls, and the 6809 processor, ONLY. And the system calls are
> written in host-native code, which speeds things up tremendously over the
> MESS situation.
> 


Well modern PCs have the capacity to emulate a few coco's at full speed
with cycles to spare. No on will know the difference as long as bootup
time is solved.

I'm just extrapolating from my experience with PC emulators like VmWare
and QEMU. They have a "save/load" virtual machine image. One would only
need to create one such image.

> The whole point is to have a development environment which is comfortable
> for people who currently know how to program, and one that poses little
> barrier to entry for a novice. Getting OS-9 running can be hairy, and
> getting a compiler running, on a CoCo, in addition to that I'm sure would
> also be somewhat more complicated than we want to make things.
> 

Yes, and if done as I am suggesting, from the user point of view, it
would appear to be just a command line utility that quickly compiles
your program for you generating object files or executables.

The user wouldn't have to set anything up if you gave them an installer
that installs a customized emulator a virtual machine image.

> The speed is definitely a consideration, and the convenience. although my
> monitor at the office is much bigger than that at home, I think my
> 1024x768 monitor at home is ample space to write code in. However, I do
> not think that 80x24 of text is. I also want fast compile times, and MESS
> can't speed that up by the orders of magnitude I'd like simply because it
> emulates the actual hardware, running OS-9 completely in emulation.
> 

The idea would be to edit on your desktop, not in the emulator. MESS
would be extended to have compiler command line options, which it would
simply pass through to the OS-9 level II command prompt.

If speed were an issue (I don't think it will be) you can probably tweak
MESS either by cmd line options or compiler switches.

Your way is cleaner, it just depends on how much work you want to do.
Having a scriptable OS-9 Level II *Coco* though opens up the
possibilities for making test scripts as well.

-- John.