Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!hp-pcd!hpcvca!charles
From: charles@hpcvca.CV.HP.COM (Charles Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Minix, Unix on the Amiga, and flames on AmigaDOS braindamage...
Message-ID: <1410023@hpcvca.CV.HP.COM>
Date: 11 Aug 89 00:25:54 GMT
References: 
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Co., Corvallis, Oregon
Lines: 28

>> Rubbish. Every AmigaOS program has to have a substantial amount of code
>> devoted to resource tracking... a job better assigned to the O/S. If you
>> don't want to call that "coding around" the problems, then you're
>> just playing games with words.

> 	Many requests for what people call "resource tracking" are actually
> requests for memory protection.  I consider any program on ANY os
> that doesn't free what it allocates (memory, file locks, whatever)
> to be at best poorly written.
> -- Randell Jesup, Keeper of AmigaDos, Commodore Engineering.

I try to write my programs in standard C so that they are portable
between Unix and Amiga.  I told a friend of mine (who doesn't own an
Amiga but who knows a great deal about Unix) that I planned to change
my programming style to explicitely free all memory that I had
malloced.  He said that under Unix that was a bad idea because the OS
can free the memory much faster than my explicit calls.  Hence I would
be slowing down my program (as well as making it larger) and would get
no benefit.  As far as I know, that criticism applys to all operating
systems except the Amiga's.

It is not clear to me that slowing down the code and making it larger
on all systems is better when there is only one system which requires
it.  (Fortunately C provides #ifdef.)
--
	Charles Brown	charles@cv.hp.com or charles%hpcvca@hplabs.hp.com
			or hplabs!hpcvca!charles or "Hey you!"
	Not representing my employer.