Nice to see this here, yes in what concerned the 8 bit world and the 16 bit home micros (PC, Amiga, Atari) C compilers just sucked.
Anyone that was writing code where performance mattered was using Assembly.
Even on 16 bit platforms, although high level languages were already quite common, in what concerns games (or demoscene), they were our "Unity".
Good enough for prototyping, but also full of inline assembly.
I once saw a game submission to a Portuguese newspaper (for a MS-DOS game), which the only C that it had were data structures and function declarations, the bodies were 100% inline Assembly.
And by the time Pentium arrived, unless one was buying Watcom, there wasn't a good C / C++ compiler that could take advantage of the pipelines and instruction scheduling in a proper way, as described by Abrash books.
Yeah, I was so excited to get my hands on UCSD Pascal because there wasn't a C compiler for Atari 8-bit. It was multi-diskette and sooo slow I never really ended up using it.
The "Action!" programming language cartridge was the best thing ever. Somewhere between C and machine language. Being in ROM it booted instantly and contained a built-in editor, compiler, runtime, and monitor. It compiled about as fast as Go does now on modern hardware.
It wasn't until I got an Atari ST (Megamax was good) or PCs that C I got to use C compilers at home.
Anyone that was writing code where performance mattered was using Assembly.
Even on 16 bit platforms, although high level languages were already quite common, in what concerns games (or demoscene), they were our "Unity".
Good enough for prototyping, but also full of inline assembly.
I once saw a game submission to a Portuguese newspaper (for a MS-DOS game), which the only C that it had were data structures and function declarations, the bodies were 100% inline Assembly.
And by the time Pentium arrived, unless one was buying Watcom, there wasn't a good C / C++ compiler that could take advantage of the pipelines and instruction scheduling in a proper way, as described by Abrash books.