Coding a .library in asm?

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by PeterK

But without this MOVEQ #-1,D0 the following resident structure gets a better longword alignment. That's why I remove this useless instruction.

I will leave the "only for idiots" part uncommented but this one I have to comment. I pretty much doubt that removing the moveq #-1,d0 instruction will lead to a better longword alignment! rts = 2 bytes, moveq #-1,d0 = 2 bytes. Assuming Amiga OS has loaded your library to an address that is longword aligned removing the moveq instruction actually destroys the longword alignment of the resident structure!

Besides, most assemblers have options (CNOP f.e.) to take care of alignment issues which should be used instead of removing "useless" instructions.

[PeterK]

I know that the start of the resident structure itself won't be longword aligned, but the pointers in this structure, the inittable and the functiontable are better aligned. On the other side, the alignment is not so important, since you will never notice a few microseconds difference of access time during InitResident().

I'm a bit surprised that this missing return code leads to such a long discussion. And I can not imagine any Amiga user to be so stupid to execute a library directly from a shell, thus there really should be no idiots, I guess.

[StingRay]

You used alignment as "excuse" for removing the moveq instruction and now you say alignment isn't that important (which I completely agree with in this case!). You're contradicting yourself.

Also, it's not about Amiga users being stupid or not, it simply is bad coding style. In my opinion at least.

[PeterK]

Originally Posted by Wepl

There should be a 'moveq #-1,d0' before the rts at the start.
With that AmigaDOS will tell 'not excutable' when started from the CLI.

The result "Not Executable" is caused when the protection flag "E" is not set. It will also be displayed when my test.library is executed from a shell.

If you set the protection flag "E" then executing a library with the return code -1 will fail as "Unknown Instruction" and the shell returns RC=10. My test.library does not produce any error messages and the RC might be a random value.

@StingRay
Ok, in your eyes it's bad coding style, but I left this instruction out by design. That's my style, basta.