Development easier than A-B-C
Posted by Steve Revill Fri, 30 Oct 2020 21:16:00 GMT
At the recent London show we launched DDE30, the new edition the Desktop Development Environment, to a wall of miniature faces via Zoom. If you weren’t able to attend, read on…
What’s inside?
- The Archimedes BASIC Compiler, ABC, has been updated to support BASIC constructs present in recent versions of the interpreter
- Allocate blocks of memory within FNs and PROCs with DIM LOCAL
- Extended forms of MODE, GCOL and COLOUR
- VDU as a function to read the VDU variables
- QUIT with a value places that in Sys$Error on exit
- Minor additions to AMU and the !Link front end
- The Norcroft C compiler, CC, has been extended to implement the latest C18 (ISO9899:2018) standard
- Static assertions, non-returning functions, generic type selection
- Variable alignment query and specifiers
- Anonymous structures and unions
- Various additions to the standard headers
- Extra library functions (already built in to RISC OS 5.28)
- Highly compatible with the earlier C99 and C90 standards
- Updated manuals including various corrections since the last printed set
- Acorn Assembler
- Acorn C/C++
- Desktop Tools
- ABC
What it all means
If you’re not a programmer many of these terms may not seem relevant, but they are – software is always evolving. More powerful tools make it easier to develop interesting applications for RISC OS users, or to build upon existing bodies of software written for other popular operating systems.
Image courtesy of Pikrepo
Read more about the DDE in the frequently asked questions.
Obtaining your copy
Anyone with an active developer number (starting ‘DEV07’) from the last 12 months will receive a link to their copy shortly. To become a registered developer or to reactivate simply go to the DDE page and scroll to the bottom to choose the appropriate option to check out.
I’m impressed that RISC OS now has a modern C compiler that supports the latest version C18. Must have involved a lot of work to achieve this. Respect to the developers who did this.
And great to see it’s a free upgrade for developers who purchased the dev tools less than 12 months ago. Nice one.
I’ve made extensive use of ASSERT in ObjAsm in the past, very handy to catch assumptions you make are still true, and lamented the absence of something similar in C (without having to resort to macros with dummy typedefs).
Finally in C18 we get static assertions. Great!