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Comment by mhd | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I remember a lot of AMOS-hostility from Amiga developers back then. Did someone actually write demos/intros in it back then or would the collective wrath of the assembly programmers be too much? ;)

(Along with AMOS, MUI was often a target. Quaint these days, given our current UI behemoths.)

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As the original author wrote, assembler is top level leet-ness. However, we aren't in our teenager years anymore and cannot spend holidays hacking our Amigas, so time constraint is a thing. To be honest, assembler coding was always tedious to say the least. Debugging, Gurus, just to name a few in inconveniences.

This opened a chance for Amos.

If you have a look at today's leet-ness, have a look a The Black Lotus. They do everything with a cross-development pipeline, they even forked Amiga UAE to streamline their process. TBL is really top notch Amiga coding, fantastic stuff.

Amos and cross-development compile to machine code in the end. Besides that it is about easing things.

For reference, here is Abyss' fantastic project: https://github.com/BartmanAbyss/vscode-amiga-debug

Amos is very well known for having one of the best developer documentation that exists for the amiga machine. It's not a poor choice. Amos is still being developed by Francois Lionet. https://www.aoz.studio/the-aoz-story

I did not say that. I like Amos nowadays. However, it wasn't a serious choice for any of us working on demos or tools back then, even usage of Amiga C was uncommon.

Same goes for Basic on C64. It is not that I dislike Basic. It simply the fact, that you get different results using assembler on C64.

Cross-development probably makes the most sense these days. Given that Rust and LLVM can already cross-compile for 68k, I wonder if anyone is planning to leverage the Rust embedded ecosystem to ease bare-metal development for these old machines (Amiga, Atari ST, 68k Mac etc.)

Well, back in the day, when intros still fulfilled their original purpose of being added to cracked games, every byte that you could save counted. Most games already used the 880K available on an Amiga floppy pretty well, so the chances of finding an extra 64K for your intro were slim...

Indeed it terms of view/emotions from "real programmers" towards AMOS - it was like Visual Basic <= v6.

And in practice I recall it was also slow for doing things like bigger scrolling things - like isometric RTS map, SimCity ...etc

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