bug65: cc65 simulator + debugger for Visual Studio Code

[greghol]

Quote:

Membership is not free at Codeberg.  I think I understand why, but I’m not willing to pay someone else to host my work.

Not free in what sense? I don't pay anything for my account.

Greg

[BigDumbDinosaur]

greghol wrote:

Quote:

Membership is not free at Codeberg.  I think I understand why, but I’m not willing to pay someone else to host my work.

Not free in what sense?  I don't pay anything for my account.

When I visited their sign-up page, it mentioned a 24 euro fee and asked me how I wanted to pay it.  I didn’t see a no-charge alternative.

[greghol]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

greghol wrote:

Quote:

Membership is not free at Codeberg.  I think I understand why, but I’m not willing to pay someone else to host my work.

Not free in what sense?  I don't pay anything for my account.

When I visited their sign-up page, it mentioned a 24 euro fee and asked me how I wanted to pay it.  I didn’t see a no-charge alternative.

I didn't even see this part of the site. But joining is a form of donation but you have more of a say when it comes to operations. All that is needed is to click on "Register" on the main page to sign up to create and use repositories etc.

First item of the FAQ:

Quote:

What do I need to use Codeberg?

All you need to use Codeberg is your user account on Codeberg.org. It is both free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-freedom, as long as you follow our Terms Of Use.

A membership in the backing non-profit association Codeberg e.V. is completely optional. We still invite you to become part of our mission by joining it. Your membership fee helps to improve the project, and the distributed voting rights maintain a healthy governance of the project.

Greg

[barnacle]

I prefer to keep my code locally, and publish, if I do, on a server I pay for (even though my local backup system has let the smoke out in the last week!).

But on the subject here: should we not be thanking Volker for his generosity in providing a free tool, rather than arguing over the way he makes it available?

Thanks again, Volker.

Neil

[WillisBlackburn]

Quote:

I beg to differ.  WDC’s C compiler, despite its age, is better, which is not saying a lot.  vbcc is compatible to ISO-1989 and most of ISO-1999—cc65 is a retread of Small C, which is basically a watered-down version of K&R C from 1978.  vbcc is under active development and incorporates contemporary thinking on compiler design—maintenance of cc65 is sporadic, with the most recent release occurring over five years ago.

I see about 180 commits to the cc65 project, on GitHub, over the last 12 months. Seems pretty active to me. It supports most of C89 with the notable exception of bitfields and floating point. Is that what you're missing?

Consider the platform here: 8-bit CPU, 64K of RAM, poor support for local variables. Do you really think that the C compiler is the limiting factor? You said yourself that you mostly program in assembly language.

[WillisBlackburn]

Quote:

So what you are saying is that I should do stuff that I do not enjoy and perhaps buy hardware that I do not need, in order to make it easier for people who are making money using my tools, but do not want to pay for it? Sorry, that does not really click with me.

No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I said that if you want people to use your stuff, you need to meet them where they are. If someone says, hey, I like your compiler, but I'd really like X, Y, and Z, and you say, I don't feel like doing any of that, then you "win," but that person isn't going to use your compiler.

How many people do you think are making money developing stuff for the 6502? Do you think they're making a lot?

[vbc]

WillisBlackburn wrote:

Quote:

So what you are saying is that I should do stuff that I do not enjoy and perhaps buy hardware that I do not need, in order to make it easier for people who are making money using my tools, but do not want to pay for it? Sorry, that does not really click with me.

No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I said that if you want people to use your stuff, you need to meet them where they are. If someone says, hey, I like your compiler, but I'd really like X, Y, and Z, and you say, I don't feel like doing any of that, then you "win," but that person isn't going to use your compiler.

Considering your main issues for X, Y, and Z were "no precompiled Apple binaries" and "not free for commercial use", this is pretty much exactly what you are saying.

Quote:

How many people do you think are making money developing stuff for the 6502? Do you think they're making a lot?

If they are not making money, why should they care about the terms for commercial use?

[WillisBlackburn]

Quote:

If they are not making money, why should they care about the terms for commercial use?

"Non-commercial" and not making money are different things. If someone uses your compiler to write a NES game and sells it for $25 because they have to package it in a cartridge and physically mail it to buyers, then that person has a business but is hardly "making money." That's the person that you're concerned might be profiting from your work?

Personally I won't use any development tool that has ambiguous or unclear commercial license terms, because I never know what's going to happen and wouldn't want to have to go negotiate a commercial license after I've put a lot of work into building something.

Why not just put the licensing terms and price on the web site? Are they secret?

[WillisBlackburn]

Quote:

But on the subject here: should we not be thanking Volker for his generosity in providing a free tool, rather than arguing over the way he makes it available?

He letting you use it without paying for it, but anything you make with it is encumbered with his restrictive license. It's free as in beer, but not free as in speech.

[WillisBlackburn]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

I can’t say with any certainty how many people there are who don’t use/like GitHub, but I can say Mac users continue to be a minority in the computing universe.  At this time, it appears that Linux-on-x86 users are likely more numerous than Mac users.

I think you're way off the mark here. Macs are extremely popular among software engineers.

I work at an organization with tens of thousands of software engineers, and most of them use Macs. Now, it's true that the software we build runs on Linux. But why do you think that everyone wants to write that software on a Mac? Because we also have Macs as our personal computers.

Another data point: In the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Windows was the most popular OS for home use: 56.7%. But second was macOS: 32.7%.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

WillisBlackburn wrote:

Quote:

But on the subject here: should we not be thanking Volker for his generosity in providing a free tool, rather than arguing over the way he makes it available?

He letting you use it without paying for it, but anything you make with it is encumbered with his restrictive license.  It's free as in beer, but not free as in speech.

Are you and Richard Stallman good drinking buddies? 

Considering the paucity of good 65xx-family C compilers, as well as the inherent complexity in writing one for an eight-bit MPU that is register-poor, I think you should be grateful that someone with Volker’s expertise has been willing to expend the not-inconsiderable effort that he did.  I for one think it’s great that a C compiler with vbcc’s capabilities is available at no cost to the 6502 community.  I haven’t used it with a 6502 or 65C02, but I have tried it out with the 65C816 in native mode.  I’m not a C expert, but do know what to look for in the generated machine code that indicates how well or how poorly the compiler did its job.  vbcc is very good and I recommend its use.

If you don’t like the terms under which Volker has made his compiler available, too bad.  It’s his project and his call as to what constitutes acceptable usage.  You are always free to design and build your own 6502 C compiler.

[vbc]

WillisBlackburn wrote:

"Non-commercial" and not making money are different things. If someone uses your compiler to write a NES game and sells it for $25 because they have to package it in a cartridge and physically mail it to buyers, then that person has a business but is hardly "making money." That's the person that you're concerned might be profiting from your work?

Personally I won't use any development tool that has ambiguous or unclear commercial license terms, because I never know what's going to happen and wouldn't want to have to go negotiate a commercial license after I've put a lot of work into building something.

That is why in such a case you should of course clarify the licenses of all your tools before starting the work. I was approached with pretty much exactly this use case a few times and then we figured something out.

WillisBlackburn wrote:

Why not just put the licensing terms and price on the web site?

I will repeat what I wrote earlier in this thread:

vbc wrote:

Usually, the terms have to be decided on a case per case basis anyway. Especially in a situation like vbcc where you may have a large company with special requests on one hand and on the other hand some guy planning to develop a game for a retro system where he expects a 50-50 chance of being able to sell a few copies.

(added the parts in italics for clarity - they should have been in the original post)

WillisBlackburn wrote:

Are they secret?

Actually, some terms that I agreed to were so generous that, yes, I prefer to keep them secret.

WillisBlackburn wrote:

Another data point: In the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Windows was the most popular OS for home use: 56.7%. But second was macOS: 32.7%.

Out of curiosity I had a look at that statistic. It apparently splits up Linux into different distributions. If you add the different Linux flavors together, you get a much higher value than for MacOS (and Windows). (However, neither the popularity of MacOS nor some issues I have with it are the reason not to provide precompiled binaries - just that MacOS makes it to difficult.)

[WillisBlackburn]

vbc wrote:

WillisBlackburn wrote:

Another data point: In the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Windows was the most popular OS for home use: 56.7%. But second was macOS: 32.7%.

Out of curiosity I had a look at that statistic. It apparently splits up Linux into different distributions. If you add the different Linux flavors together, you get a much higher value than for MacOS (and Windows). (However, neither the popularity of MacOS nor some issues I have with it are the reason not to provide precompiled binaries - just that MacOS makes it to difficult.)

You can't add the values; developers can use more than one OS and the values total to more than 100%. The point is that a third of developers who responded to the survey use a Mac in some capacity.

What do you mean by "macOS makes it too difficult" to provide compiled binaries? You know that macOS is Unix, right? All the stuff you're used to just works natively and you can download and install all the development tools in 15 minutes.

Have you ever used any Mac from the last 15 years or so?

[WillisBlackburn]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

If you don’t like the terms under which Volker has made his compiler available, too bad.  It’s his project and his call as to what constitutes acceptable usage.  You are always free to design and build your own 6502 C compiler.

Absolutely, he's free to do whatever he wants!

[vbc]

WillisBlackburn wrote:

What do you mean by "macOS makes it too difficult" to provide compiled binaries?

From last time I looked into this, I seem to recall that you need a MacOS SDK which explicitly must only be used on Apple hardware. Furthermore it seemed that you probably also have to join some Apple developer program in order to sign the application and prevent the OS from hassling the user (although I did not look closer into this as I do not own Apple hardware).

Quote:

Have you ever used any Mac from the last 15 years or so?

No.