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.