Quote:
Originally Posted by Akira
Fair enough, I was being too harsh. But from the get-go I suffered those stupid Validation issues whenever a shitty program crashed while the disk was being accessed somehow, and they were really painful to stomach, and that is when there were no other errors after validation. I really grew to hate it, haha.
|
The file system turned out to be a poor fit for this operating system.
Both Kickstart and Workbench software suffered greatly from stability problems until the entire code was reviewed and reworked for Kickstart/Workbench 2.0. Some of the big problems resulted from not testing for memory allocation failure, from failing to propagate error conditions through the callchain, and (who knew) operating system code relying on the contents of scratch registers.
Commodore could address these issues, but 3rd party developers often struggled to produce robust software: the Amiga operating system design is very unforgiving when it comes to accidental memory corruption. When it was new, the Amiga operating system was much, much more complex than what came before it, if you were familiar only with the hobbyist and home computers that shipped in the previous 10 years.
Finding the right spot in which the floppy disks were not a nuisance and the file system didn't cause trouble was possible, but it was damn hard to get there
I recall that for me the turning point came when I bought an external disk drive. Finally, I was able to use the external drive to make my first steps into becoming a better programmer, by keeping the project data on it rather than on the boot floppy. Making backups also became much easier. Containing the damage, mitating the risk, was possible at last.
Still, you could not rely upon the file system, and just trying to mitigate the risks made it harder what was already hard to begin with: Amiga software development. You probably know the many anecdotal stories of programmers losing all their work just because one floppy disk failed, no usable backups were available and repairs did not succeed.