mantisspider on 2003/11/30 0:41:02
Whats so good about DE? From all the hype and the posts in the DE forums when they were live a few yrs ago nothing ever happened.
IIRC the only software made in the end was a little games pack available on a smart card.
is it supposed to be the case of stand back XP amigaDE is here? what benefits would merging amigaDE and OS4 have? please enlighten me as I am pretty ignorant and after being shown amigaDE all those years ago I could smell that nothing would happen so I didnt bother looking again.
There are a number of things that need to separated out. The Taos engine is just a typical stripped down embeded OS - it has some interesting features but nothing to set the world on fire. It works smoothly even ontop of Windows (leaves the underlying OS in shame to tell the truth).
Its main virtue of course is that it and its apps are compiled to a virtual CPU and translated very smartly to the CPU you are actually running it on (200k translation base). It can also be hosted ontop of another OS or run by itself.
AmigaDE as it presently stands is only a specification for applications compiled for and running on Toas, there are a few specifically Amiga bits involved but nothing to set you on fire. At the moment it is just biased towards the PDA and small things market which Toas small footprint is well suited and its CPU agnosticism suits.
For a while Taos has been dragging its feet in making a CPU translator for the PPC. Apple is not either big enough and Toas has no real role there. So I suggest that the recent interest form Pegasos might owe itself not to anything that Amiga has done, but perhaps because Toas is finally getting the PPC translator working properly - I think the MicroA1 may have been very persuasive as well as sales of the A1 which have recently spiked a little.
It could also be the case that the release of OS4 may have Toas running ontop of it, the timing seems right but no promises have been given that I know about.
For the Amiga community the fact that most of the OS has been rewritten in vanilla C is very important, because then recompiling into Toas for OS5 is relatively easy.
Now when OS5 happens then Toas changes quite radically. Instead of being a bare bones "embedded OS" like all the others, Toas as AmigaDE 5 is now a fully fledged OS with still a small footprint.
Moreover, I strongly suspect, it will be also avialable as a 64bit package and the filesystem will be unrecogniziable.
OK all this is just the jigsaw pieces and how they fit - what are the benefits.
Anything compiled for the Toas engine is portable by nature. Moreover, because it is a software abstraction layer between the OS and the CPU all such software is potentially permanent regardless of future hardware changes. Multi-processing, etc is all inbuilt, etc.
Toas has a number of standard compilers. There is a form of assembler (VP which even I can use), C and C++. Most interesting is SHEEP the future replacement of AREXX which interfaces to AREXX ports (and other scripting ports) seems as simple to use as AREXX and can be compiled into VP code and compiled as tools (without I believe importing vast parts of the interpreter into its compile).
There are some inherent benefits in this step.
Basically the OS4 things and AmigaDE is a lock step strategy (previously I think the idea was to move directly to AmigaDE without either a PPC board or an in between AmigaOS). Now the logic seems to be to supply the existing Amiga community with a much revised OS and a board to run it on, in the process of moving towards AmigaDE/OS5.
It is I think really quite elegant - rewriting the Amiga in vanilla C, developing the OS in a couple of steps (4.1 and 4.2) means the transition to OS5 is really half made.
My personal belief is that Amiga as we know it (its apps) will become a form of legacy ware running within a familiar but radically changed new Amiga OS where apps will be compiled into Toas tools (very handy little objects - each with its own interface and each part automatically becomes a shared library and these are tiny!!).
However, the main benefit will be that Amiga will become the first full OS that is CPU independant, capable of being hoisted or booting whatever machine you happen to have, small enough for PDAs and whatever else can hold a few megabytes of ROM.
For users its means that a piece of software can potentially always run even whent he OS changes beyond recognition and whatever hardware is there. For developers it means compiling once and having their software everywhere (I would not be surprised if some bigger developers wrap the whole thing up with their software.
Greg Schofield
