C68 for QDOS

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Status

The following give you some idea of the areas of improvement that are in this release:

• Various bug fixes. Most of them are relatively minor as C68 is now a very stable product, but there are still quite a few.
• Improved code generation. We have managed to find a few more areas in which the code can be improved.
• Improved support for hardware Floating Point. The C68 package now includes as standard George Gwilt's FPU support package that adds proper support for hardware FPU to any QDOS compatible system. Also there are fixes in the code generated by the compiler.
• New LIBLIST library added to the distribution.
• Signal handling v3 now shipping as part of C68.

All files that make up this release is available for download from this site.

Current developments and plans

• Runtime Link Libraries September 2000

  This development is now completed.

  This facility brings to QDOS/SMS based system the concept of shareable libraries.

  As part of this development there are two new libraries that are being made available for developers. These are:

  • The LIBSROFF library which provides facilities to help with manipulating SROFF libraries.

  • The LIBRLL library which provides facilities to help with manipulating RLL libraries.

  The idea behind these two libraries is that it means it is possible to write programs and utilities that manipulate SROFF or RLL libraries without being concerned with the fine detail of their internal formats. As well as reducing the development effort, this makes it possible for us to introduce changes to the file formats used, and by merely upgrading the libraries and then relinking programs, they will automatically be able to handle the new file formats.

  I have also been working with Joachim Van de Auwera of PROGS fame. As a result, we have added to the RLL specification support for what are being called "modules". This is specfically aimed at cases in which one wants to load one of a variety of modules that all support the same interface. Examples would be printer drivers, or perhaps file transfer protocols in a terminal emulator.

• Compiler improvements

  The following are on the development path for future releases of C68.

  Relocatable data area

  We have made changes that allows the uninitialiased data segment be position independent and accessed via a data register. This will be useful in building RLL libraries to allow access to global variables. To finally finish off though we need the same assembler improvement mentioned in the next point.

  Relocatable code

  We have finally worked out how to produce position independent code - something that many users have requested for a long time.

  The changes to the compiler have been done, and we are now working on changes to the AS68 assembler that are needed to complement this change. Fundamentally this involves getting AS68 to correctly handle 'label-label' constructs when one or more of the labels are external to the current source file.

  They will, however, be given a lower priority than finishing of the work to do with releasing RLL library support, so the timescale is indeterminate.