What is the fastest Amiga assembler

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Thorham

An Amiga?

It's a benchmarking exercise rather than someone needing to speed up a large build, right?

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by phx

But Basm is a single-pass assembler

Are we talking abut the same product? I've had it do 11-12 passes on my builds some times.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Karlos

It's a benchmarking exercise rather than someone needing to speed up a large build, right?

Some people use their Amigas for programming in assembly language, so a fast assembler helps.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Some people use their Amigas for programming in assembly language, so a fast assembler helps.

Sure, I used to (I use vasm these days). I guess I got spoiled by having an accelerated machine, even if it was just an 040. I don't ever recall the time it took assembly code to build being annoying, no matter which assembler I used. C, on the other hand, yes. Especially with optimisations enabled. That could take a while. Even that stopped being much of an issue when I used StormC 4, since there were PPC native compiler backends that were a lot faster.

[phx]

Originally Posted by NorthWay

Are we talking abut the same product?

Not sure. BAsm = Barfly Assembler by Ralph Schmidt?

I've had it do 11-12 passes on my builds some times.

Hmm. The version I remember definitely mentioned in the documentation it is a single-pass assembler, and some of the problems this causes.

[a/b]

Single-pass meaning it parses the source only once and constructs the entire code in pass1, and then in a short pass2 it handles the unresolved symbols. Optimizer is multi-pass, as usual.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Karlos

I guess I got spoiled by having an accelerated machine, even if it was just an 040.

I've seen assemblers like AsmOne be pretty slow on my 50mhz 68030.

[bebbo]

what about OMA 2.0?

[Photon]

Originally Posted by alexh

The fastest assembler is surely a cross assembler on your PC/Mac on a shared drive

Saying, "Why use an Amiga to write code, PC is faster?" is a hair's breadth away from "Why write code for Amiga, PC is faster"

We are seeing a hybrid thing of this with the PiStorms, Vampires etc. which are somewhere in between the two.

If you don't want to use an Amiga, IDK why you should produce binaries for others to use them on their Amigas? Replace Amiga with "platform X" as you see fit - if it doesn't have your editor, language, or tools and you love it, why not make some? Why edit/code/create on a platform you don't love and send it over for "those guys" to actually run? I mean that this is a really important point for the longevity of the platform.

And not so fast about the speed. Modern platforms bring extra steps and bloat.

E.g. binding the Warp key in an emu will let you code+run on emulated Amiga with no speed issues.

And I find great joy in turning away from distractions and to the directness of my Amiga when I code. It can be very fast indeed, press 1 key and 2s later your code runs.

This is how I use my 3 main coding machines (A500/A1260/A600 in sig), with the PC as slave to sync to Dropbox, Github, and I take advantage of Dropbox/WinUAE when I'm not coding demo/game stuff, do large reorganization of my sources, and to switch configs quickly so my code gets tested thoroughly (e.g. NTSC machines which I don't have).

You can do many things to improve "build" times regardless of solution: Rid converters, write modular code, in general cut out the middleman wherever he lurks.

[Karlos]

I can't speak for anyone else, but today, I depend on emulation and cross development tools. I still want my code to run on real hardware.