AmigaOS DevContest kicks off!

[itix]

@batman

I find this competition idea very good, but

1) os3.9 and os4.0 APIs are quite similar. Os4.0 has some enhancements yes, but these doesn't broke retrocompatibility. It's somewhat like to port from linux 2.0 on i386 to linux 2.4 on i686.

You are missing the point. OS 4.0 PPC API implements OS 3.0 API (except some OldOpenLibrary(), TaggedOpenLibrary() etc.) but there are also new API calls which are not available in 3.9. That is what makes this competition problematic (IMO + standard disclaimers here).

Cross compiling itself is not problem. Even StormC (the one that supports PPC ELFs) can generate OS4 compatible binaries if you know what you are doing.

[itix]

Maybe I'm missing the point here, but I had the possibility to give a rapid look to the SDK and I found that code suited for 68k could run without any problem and using only OS3.0 API (if well coded, of course).

Depends how it is coded. If you use mainly ANSI C functions there are less problems. But it is still possible to write code that compiles perfectly for 68k but goes wrong for PPC target (68k varargs...).

Even hooks can cause headache. In older OS4 kernel versions you had to use 68k stub to get working PPC dispatcher for MUI (this was fixed later, i dont know what was issue), how one is expected to sort them out without proper test environment? What if you made a typo and you call GetInterface() by wrong name? When testing on OS3 you cant spot these things and GetInterface() calls wont show up in SnoopDos either. There are just many issues... Everyone is free to try and do what he wants, though.

[itix]

- Due to the myriad of different custom classes and the fact that lots of functionality is duplicated, it is sometimes difficult to keep up-to-date with an application's requirements for custom class versions.

That is quite much due to lack of new MUI releases during past years. Since list.mui was not advancing nlist.mcc was made. Then came betterstring (and newstring + textinput), betterbalance, nlisttree (listtree.mcc author disappeared) and dozen crappy toolbar classes. But MUI 3.9 added many new features and more is coming.

There are also many MUI custom classes because MUI is simply popular.