- gcc (hard to setup and not so user friendly)
It is not hard to setup for OS3, but it takes time, especially for searching and downloading all the relevant parts.
One to three hours must be invested, depending on your experience.
vbcc comes with an Amiga installation script, hence it is much easier to install and requires only a few seconds or minutes to be installed, depending on the host machine and backends you want to have installed.
My main aim is to do some basic stuff (at the beginning) focussing mostly on the classic platform (OS3.X), but with the idea of porting the most valuable project also on the other Amiga flavours.
That can be reached with any compiler as long as you ignore special features of the compiler's C-runtime lib and special compiler features. This doesn't mean that you can use DICE C or SAS/C for porting, but that you can use gcc or vbcc for this task with no or only few changes applied to the source code.
But now I don't want to start to code eg. with SAS/C if it contains too many non-stardard compiler dependencies (as I read in a forum), since this will lead to difficulties in porting the code on other platforms/flavours.
What makes SAS/C so special is its C-runtime lib. If you forego to use functions, which are SAS/C only, like for example stcd_l and the alike, and use instead the OS provided counterparts, nothing speaks against using SAS/C, even you take into consideration to port this source code one time to another Amiga flavour.
But I'd like to know if the big manuals are still valuable for programming the Amiga today, or if the info is outdated, and the docs can be found on the Internet are more the sufficient for a proper and clean coding.
I would speculate that your manuals cover the operating system of version 2, not 3. That means they are outdated in some segments, but not entirely.
Always have the current autodocs at hand in order to verify what in the manuals is stated. Non standard C-lib functions of the SAS/C C-runtime library should be avoided by all means, otherwise you put yourself into the trouble to re-design them for other Amiga flavours or compilers, once you want to port your source codes.
Ahhh... I don't need C++ (at least on my Amiga projects), and is it true that I can make a shared library just with SAS/C and Storm C? This seems strange to me...
As Piru already pointed out, it can be done with any compiler, even with HiSoftC++, which is a weak compiler.
To hide compiler specific attributes and keywords, use SDI_Headers, which is a collection of macros just designed for this purpose.
If you want to write a shared library, have a look at "Weaver" on "amimedic.de", which is a tool that allows you to create the library frame on a source code level. It makes use of SDI_Headers and supports you in creating OS3, AROS, MorphOS and AmigaOS4 shared library source codes. The created results were already successfully tested with gcc and vbcc.
