Layers.library V45 on the aminet

[biggun]

Hi Thomas,

great work. Nice to see this update. Thanks!

What you say that Intuition could be enabled to support dragging windows out of the screen sound cool.
I like this feature.
How complicated would this be in your opinion?

[biggun]

Some people should better know when to shut up.

[biggun]

If you read the posts and rantings here,
then one could come to the conclusion :
that for those who actaully  spend time on working on AMIGA software
it will be smart to not publish the software, or it least not to announce it at a forum like this .

[biggun]

Please let me give my 2cents to it to.

I think what Thomas does is great,
He improved the algorithm resulting in a big improvement.

I also like what Cosmos does.
Cosmos shows great ASM skills and extrem hard will to understand the ASM codes.
His tuning are certainly interesting for many.
But I personally could also envision other great uses for his shown great skills.

For example:
Lets assume Cosmos would develop the bitplane GFX driver for AROS.
This could be great for the free AMIGA future and make AROS become real fast on 68k.

I think what Cosmos does right now is he looks at the compiler generated ASM output
and then figures that there are 10 instructions - which a smart coder could rewrite doen to 6.
And then he does this.
While this is cool and great - I wonder what would happen if he would not change this one routine -
but change the compiler to in the future see and use such optimizations.
Could this work? And how would the gain be if one would then recompile A-OS or AROS with the tuned compiler?

[biggun]

Never say never.

That's the spirit!

The hard part is in figuring out if the result is sufficiently robust and does not cause important application software to fail. In short, while the code does work, it needs a QA team to make sure it's up to standards: beta testing, and fixing the bugs.

QA and testing work might be something which could be distributed well enough on a voluntary team.
There are still some parties put quite some man power and energie in 68K development right now.
I think here of the efforts to design compatible chipsets and 68k cores.
These teams also needs and use QA, to ensure that the chipset is compatible and the CPUs are compatible.

[biggun]

Olsen , Thomas,

I have to ask a stupid question here.

When you would such a possible buyout of AMIGA OS - with the existing free AROS.
Where are the advantages?

Is AROS so far from this?
Or would AROS have already some areas where its ahead - like a MUI clone etc?

What is AROS really missing today?

[biggun]

I do not understand the question, could you reword it?

I used AROS a couple times on x86.
On x86 AROS looked very amiga-ish and very good.
I compiled a couple of selfwritten Amiga shell tools for it.
This worked fine and the programs ran fine.
From just having a gimse look - it looked very AMIGA like and it looked working to me.

I have not used AROS on 68K so far, so I have no clue what is missing there.
Maybe not much?


I generally like the idea to continue developing AMIGA OS for 68k very much.

When I understood you right you and Thomas were discussing the option to develop a new AMIGA OS version - e.g 3.9.1 or whatever..

My question was : Can someone give a statement how close/far the result would be to what AROS is today.

I wonder what the percentage of AROS to AMIGA completness is today.
If for example AROS has 95% of what is needed to be a 100% AMIGA OS replacement ?
Then maybe a bounty to get a knowledgeable developer that now how to code this part for AMIGA OS would be an option?

Or maybe just buying out the right of this part of AMIGA OS 3.1?

[biggun]

Hi Olaf,

From what you say AROS 68K is already or can already be a very good AMIGA OS replacement?


If there are areas where performance could be improved like e.g EXEC, or LAYERS.
Would these be areas where some geeks ould help?

I would assume Cosmos would be talented for tuning Exec?

And I would think that Thomas would be the perfect guy to do layer super fast?

[biggun]

Indeed
If you know you're right, than post a good example of an algorithm for which this applies, because I sure would like to see it. Or more than one, if possible.

Of course you can in theory implement all and everything in ASM.
The point is that if you write complex algorithms its a lot easier to keep the overview if you use a high level language.

[biggun]

I don't use one, it doesn't make much sense for solo projects...

Its crucial for team projects
and it can be very helpful also for solo projects.

Imagine a big project with many files on which you work for several years.
Every code change you did is with a revision system "marked" with a comment explaining its intention.
E.g.
"chip-bus rewrite to lower latency"
"decoder PC-calc change to improve clockrate"
"Ea rewrite to reduce LE count"
...
With a revisioning system you could "rollback" certain code changes even much later - if you expect them to cause problems.

You can also flag certain know good/stable version easily.
And you can easily mark releases.

If you give our releases to customer you can later apply importatn fixes to these releases as updates - without adding new features whih the main developmen stream might have,

For a sensible software development with release which get supported etc - something like a revision system is required to be able to do this.