The Z88 Development Kit - History

z88dkv1.2p5 - sccz80v1.10b0.69 6.3.2000

New for this release are the following features:


sccz80v1.10b0.67 (internal release)

Fixes and things sorted out:


As a recap on the versions between v0.66 of the compiler and whatever the last release beneath was (v0.55?) here are the important new features:


New for v1.2 on v1.1 are the following features:


New for v1.1 of Z88dk (sccz80 v0.55) are the following features:


New for v0.52 of the compiler are the following features:


New for v0.49 of the compiler are the following features:


Release v0.52 22/3/99

Does anyone actually read this file? Anyway, I've had enough of this compiler for the moment so this is the first Aminet version (no doubt to be followed by another later this week!) Lots of fixes in this release and a couple of extensions as well, but if you've read the docs you'll know that of course!


Pre-release v0.51 18/3/99

This is just getting silly! Everytime I say I want to release it I go through a spurt of adding new features, new this time are:


Pre-release v0.50 17/3/99

Corrected a few silly problems with function return values (prototyping), killed a silly error, added the -Wnone flag.


Pre-release v0.49 16/3/99

Hopefully the same as v0.48d?


Pre-release v0.48[a-e] 5-14/3/99

Internal release. This version saw a substantial rejigging of the compiler code to allow almost error free compilation - gcc -Wall is now without errors (I'm not going to bother with -pedantic!) Several annoying bugs which only showed up on Linux were fixed. Memory leaks on Winblows were sorted out (sassen frassen). Full prototypes make their appearance for the first time in Small C (is it right to call it Small C anymore?)


Pre-release v0.47 3/3/99

Internal bug fix release only


Pre-release v0.46 2/3/99

zcc Added provison for a second layer of optimization and a few other tweaks. Sorted out a few problems which would have arisen in multi-module programs which used floating point operations. Also allowed the order of input files to be irrelevant (previously the file with main() had to be the first in the list.

copt Second rule file for optimization of logical operations on unsigned chars as well as a few other simple optimizations.

sccz80 Fixed lots of bugs in cc6.c regarding calling of long functions (mainly missed out else statements!), squashed bugs in +/- calling for long functions (stack was not being equalised correctly), sorted out the widenlong() function in cc5.c so that chars/ints are correctly extended to longs (regardless of sign). Sorted out representation of negative long constants, countless other bug fixes to long routines.

Improved the handling of -no-header (this is used to compile library sources which are in C) so now it does something useful. It's also now possible to overwrite library functions for a particular program (in principle at least) - though are you sure you want to do this?

library Almost completely rewritten the library routines for long - there were so many silly mistakes here it amazes me that no one actually spotted them, I've extensively tested them, and am fairly confident that they all work now. Some sample problems that I came across l_long_sub calculated b-a instead of a-b l_long_inc/dec were completely fubarred. Comparison routines were complete nonsense (some more so than others) - mostly due to the l_long_sub bug/feature <grin>. In summary it transpires that what with bugs in the compiler and in the libraries that any code utilising longs would never have worked.

There's also lots of new string functions as well as some new ctype functions. Also all new is a malloc() system.


Pre-release v0.45 ??/2/99

This release only got as far as Dennis, it's the release that first saw the introduction of the config file for zcc.


Pre-release v0.44 19/1/99

I hope you all had a good holiday season and are ready to start attempting to trip the compiler up once more!

A new frontend with this edition, and at last meaningful flags for the compiler. Also new is support for Z88 maths routines - there is something fishy somewhere in the code though - the cube.c example refuses to work correctly and I'm baffled!

Fixed a problem with #pragma asm/endasm statements - they weren't being parsed correctly.


Pre-release v0.43 2/12/98

A bit of a little bug fix release really, I noticed a few problems with the generated code and though I'd better fix them sharpish (The classic one is of course getting the size of integer incorrect!). There's also a new demo program - Dstarz88


Pre-release v0.42 29/11/98

Far pointers have been implemented, hopefully correctly, declare as you would a normal pointer but prefix by "far". No support routines have been written for them, so nothing will compile if you use them , but have a look at the assembler file and see whether it is as you would expect it to be. [See far.html for descriptions of the proposed routines!]

I've also done a bit of fixing up of longs, so now you can set them equal to a constant correctly! And finally, yes I know I've been saying it for the past x releases, but longs should work properly know - I've fixed up long comparisions in if statements, and it's also possible to switch via a long (untested!). Also added is a lot of type-checking so that you get warnings if you try to equate/do arithmetic on different signed values (obviously not applicable for +/-). This behaviour isn't ANSI atm, in the future I'll fix it so promotion to unsigned takes place. Also, warnings pop up if you do int<->ptr conversions - it's not really a good idea to do these sort of things if you want your code to be portable! [Code will still be generated, but side effects might occur!]

Fixed the "bug" in the 16 bit divide routines - I got the input parameters the wrong way round, an ex de,hl solves all! Did a small mod in crt0/l_mult to change rl a to rla (DLE).


Pre-release v0.41 17/11/98

This and v0.40 were released concurrently, this version adds literal queue compression to save memory in the resulting executable - it works remarkable well and saves almost 180 bytes in the cube demo, in programs with lots of text even more should be saved.


Pre-release v0.40 16/11/98

Another long pause However, to make it worth your while I've come back with a cracker - hopefully longs will now be functioning correctly. I've changed the manner in which they were stored when calling library functions - now like doubles they are stored on the stack instead of in the alternate registers, this makes for much nicer code that will work as opposed to code that might work! To celebrate this I've written 32 bit multiplication and division routines!

Also rewritten are the 16 bit multiply and divide routines (they're now a little small and hopefully faster), and I've finally got the (l)abs routines right..or at least I hope so!

Labels in the compiler are now prefixed by a smc_ to avoid potential label clashes with routines in the library. A little bit more work has be done on long pointers though they still won't work! [I'm gonna hate sorting that out!]

Barring any major hiccups I think the compiler is almost ready for its first public release, any comments?


Pre-release v0.39 20/10/98

Apologies for the long delay in releasing this - I've been kinda tied up with other things of late! Anyway, it's now here and the compiler now fixes a few things like signed chars (dumb mistake by me) and the initialisation of aggregates.

In the library functions it's been big change time - the graphic functions have been rewritten so that they page in the map bank each time (previously it was (rather sloppily!)) just left paged in permanently. As predicted this caused a "few" problems! There's an integer printf function - use only if absolutely necessary - even after serious hand optimization (It took a whole evening!!) it still weighs in at around 2k. The exit() function has been rewritten to cope with the atexit() function which someone might possibly care to use. More serious problems are avoided by insertion of the correct case/switch function! Ooops, that one was hanging around waiting to clobber people!


Pre-release v0.38 8/10/98

Implemented the local static variable storage class and fixed a few minor problems in sccz80 with filenames, removed some obsolete code, removed the prototypes for malloc and exit from ccfunc.h and included stdlib.h where appropriate.

Corrected the strings.h include file and altered the strncmp() library function to be more efficient and smaller (DLE), found the minusfa fp routine and put it in mathsupp/ along with odd. Altered the double <= function so it has the label dleq so to avoid clash with a defc in cntlchar.def - hopefully fp programs will now compile?


Pre-release v0.37 6/10/98

The last two releases never got very far due to problems with prototyping. This new release fixes those, and adds another batch of library functions - investigate the headers for more details!

This release is only supplied as a complete archive because I've completely reorganised the libsrc/ directory and added several new files - it's much easier to start again that to create a set of patch distributions!

Hopefully I've finally(!) fully implemented unsigned datatypes - they are now scanned for in function definitions, also a bare unsigned results in an unsigned int being produced. Removed the int and word datatypes - silly! In the source code spent a lot of time prototyping certain functions to knock some warnings off a -Wall compilation.



Allowed for longer include filenames than 16! This also prevents possible segmentation faults - which solves the Amiga "gcc" problem and quite a few others I imagine as well!

The keywords register and auto are parsed for in statement() though they are silently ignored.

There's a very big bugfix for this release, dereferencing of pointers are now resolved correctly and generate good code - this was broken since v0.33 and was due to the incorrect assignment of one variable in the primary() function. This took me about 4 hours to track down and correct! Many thanks to David Earlam for putting me onto the trail for this one.

There's also another optimization rule which optimizes some more of the structure referencing code.


Pre-release v0.36 29/9/98

sccz80 Pesky prototypes again, now they're done with #pragma proto and #pragma unproto, these will now work with the Borland pp.

Hopefully sorted out the gcc crash problem, this was due to not checking whether a pointer to struct was set or not, if unset the compiler tried to reference an address in low memory and this seems to have upset the memory protection agent, though why it should also do this on the Amiga which has no memory protection is a tad strange.

Implemented Dennis' startup code so a BASIC program is generated which contains the compiled code as well making life that little bit easier!

Added a couple more optimizing rules.


Pre-release v0.35 28/9/98

sccz80 (Almost) ANSI function definitions have been implemented. Fixed the distinguishing of prototypes by implementing #proto/#unproto. The previous fix used #defines which were swallowed by the preprocessor.

Fixed a problem that arose after v0.32 due to over-zealous use of the delete line key!


Pre-release v0.34 22/9/98

sccz80 Made the error messages much more legible (i.e. ala Dice), corrected a nasty hang which could result if a symbol wasn't found by end of file, made the differentiation between library functions and external functions in other modules.

Includes Implemented the slightly kludgey (but it works!) way of ensuring that prototypes here do reference the library functions.


Pre-release v0.33 14/9/98

sccz80 Implemented the long data type and the associated libraries.


Pre-release v0.32 12-13/9/98

sccz80 Changed the maximum line length to 192 (so as to get enigma_sc to compile!), and altered the assembler label length from 8 to 32.

The big modification is the use of the signed and unsigned keywords - this actually affects the code being produced and hence should work! A small warning (which I shouldn't really need to state :) is that don't try doing functions on combinations of the two, really weird things will result otherwise!

Libraries Corrected a few label problems in the l_mul and l_lt library functions.

Optimizer Put some of the rules in the correct order so that they don't prevent other optimizations being made.

zcc New pass through to the compiler for -e (stop on errors) and -f (implicitly define all ints and chars as unsigned.)

Startup code Installs a simple error handler which will trap escapes to stop those annoying hangs. Pressing escape will abort the program (much like Ctrl+C does on other computers).


Pre-release v0.31 8/9/98

sccz80 Corrected a few problems in the definition of extern and static variables (assembler output) - programs should now compile and execute correctly!

Restored the data type of external pointer (lost in the conversion over to Small C+). Allowed the explicit use of static for global variables. Created a fake data size of void (which is effectively int) for functions, thus allowing more code to compile with fewer changes.

zcc Allowed passing of -A flag to the compiler


Pre-release v0.3 6/9/98

The most important change is that to the Small-C+ compiler which has more features than the original Small-C and will allow the compilation of many more programs.

Have moved all of the runtime functions previously held in z88_crt0.asm into library functions so will only be linked in if needed, this has a dramatic effect at reducing the size of the produced binaries. Hopefully all the cross references have been resolved correctly.


Pre-release v0.2 August 1998

Added a lot of untested library functions, and a driver.


Pre-release v0.1 August 1998

First release of the Z80 compatible Small-C compiler based on the zcc v0.96 sources by Ken Yap. Very minimal, just enough to compile Hello World.


Dom 1.3.2000