Developer tools

All the previous sections are mainly addressed to people that want to know what MorphOS is from the point of view of a normal user. But there are less common users who certainly have specific interest for other details of the MorphOS environment: the developers. These are the most important persons in any computer platform, because without them there is no new software, and the platform will go quickly to a stagnation state. Either directed by professional interest or hobbyistic purposes, any coder wants to know what is the environment available for his activity.

MorphOS of course has a dedicated Software Development Kit that allows any coder to create applications. The SDK is completely free: any developer can download the relevant archives. Please note that the SDK is available for anyone, also people who do not own the hardware necessary to run MorphOS. Indeed this has two important effects: it allows the creation of Integrated Development Environments by third parties (Cubic IDE), and also allows cross-compiling from any platform, in particular from Linux, or Windows by means of cygwin (related sites: Cross-compiling for MorphOS, AmiDevCpp).

The SDK of MorphOS contains all system includes; developer documentation including autodocs, articles, example code, and general information; third party tools and developer documentation; and two very useful components, MorphEd and a complete Geek Gadgets environment. MorphEd is an advanced text editor that, besides all the functions usually expected for text editing, offers syntax highlighting, developer environment support, integration of the GCC or vbcc compiler, and so on. The Geek Gadgets are a large body of development tools that have been ported to Amiga/MorphOS and are available in both source and binary form. The package contains, among other things, a lot of commands available for Linux shells, and its aim is to provide people accustomed to Linux environments with a familiar command environment within MorphOS shells.

Right now, the SDK of MorphOS still refers to the older 1.4.5 version. It can be brought up to date by downloading the relevant system includes supporting MorphOS 2.x from the Download section of the official MorphOS web page. A fully updated SDK is still expected to be released as soon as the developers will find time to create a package that is as comprehensive, polished and easy to install as the current one. It has to be noted, in fact, that the installation process is easy enough to enable the usage of the SDK contents to non developers as well. Common users will terefore be able to use the already mentioned MorphEd text editor and the shell commands. Installing the SDK is in fact suggested also to enable the fruition of some third party software - like the Peer2Peer program MLDonkey and the YouTube downloader Tubexx - that requires some of these Linux shell commands.

The availability of GCC, the most diffused C compiler, and others, does not exhaust the list of interpreters and compilers existing for MorphOS: a full scale is available, ranging from PowerPC machine code assemblers for low-level programming to high-level languages like the classical FreePascal and more modern products like Python.