I was astonished to find about 22 distinct C compilers, including their own libraries, assemblers, linkers etc. for the Atari ST and its successors. That's not counting separate versions, just distinct products from different vendors.
From what I can see now looking at archive sites, there was a huge amount of activity in developer tools on the ST back in the day. Much more than I thought at the time. It might have been a serious contender for the dominant architecture (along with the m68k CPU), if IBM PC-compatibles and x86 hadn't won.
Recently I looked for Atari ST C compilers, out of curiosity to test portability of a C program I'm working on.
I've been testing C code for diverse Unix systems.
As I used to own an Atari 520ST (with 1MB RAM beautifully piggy-backed and hand-soldered on the existing RAM chips :-), it seemed like a good idea to peek at C on an ST emulator. I didn't use C when I had a real Atari ST (no C books in my local library), so I expected to find one or two C compilers, not 22!
I think that I used the Megamax C compiler back in 1987-8. I was just messing around and experimenting, not programming professionally, but it worked well for me.
I had that. Later renamed Laser C. Being a poor college student I used a Radio Shack floppy disk drive for a second 3.5", hand-soldering the DIN connector the ST used. Afterwards I could have my compiler tools on one and source/object code on the other - a huge time saver.
Try and get a compiler and linker to fit in 360k these days!
I was astonished to find about 22 distinct C compilers, including their own libraries, assemblers, linkers etc. for the Atari ST and its successors. That's not counting separate versions, just distinct products from different vendors.
From what I can see now looking at archive sites, there was a huge amount of activity in developer tools on the ST back in the day. Much more than I thought at the time. It might have been a serious contender for the dominant architecture (along with the m68k CPU), if IBM PC-compatibles and x86 hadn't won.
Recently I looked for Atari ST C compilers, out of curiosity to test portability of a C program I'm working on.
I've been testing C code for diverse Unix systems.
As I used to own an Atari 520ST (with 1MB RAM beautifully piggy-backed and hand-soldered on the existing RAM chips :-), it seemed like a good idea to peek at C on an ST emulator. I didn't use C when I had a real Atari ST (no C books in my local library), so I expected to find one or two C compilers, not 22!