AROS

I spent the weekend teaching myself some Amiga GUI (Intuition) programming using AROS via the Icaros Desktop distribution, their developer guides, and the Amiga developer CD. It’s a nice enough system to program in that works like most other GUI systems; GUI events are sent to your process as messages that you receive, handle, and reply to. GUIs are built out of gadgets attached to windows displayed on screens.

As a system to use, it feels efficient and fast. AROS is, as the Rhapsody developer releases were, a platform displaced in time: someone designed it to run on a 680×0 with a couple of megabytes of RAM and a floppy drive, and here we are with our modern CPU, gigabytes of RAM and solid state storage. It starts near-instantly, responds quickly (even though it’s running in VirtualBox under a Windows 10 host), it’s beautiful. And it’s not overloaded with widgets and gewgaws added by vendors who are keeping up with the Joneses by adding every new feature to every platform they support. No notifications ask me whether I’m interested in a tour of all the latest features that I’d be unable to find myself.

As I write this post (in the Odyssey Web Browser in Icaros Desktop, of course), I wonder whether I need all of the other things I would get if I were doing this directly in Windows, or in macOS, or a modern Linux distribution. Give me a compiler long enough and a place to save and I shall move the Earth.