Happy New Year! With a new year comes new revelations and wow do I have a doozy – ARM GCC is just completely broken. I'm not saying it doesn't produce working code but there are cases where it produces obscenely poor performing code.

In Part 1 we looked at how PJIT can be faster than existing traditional interpreters and in Part 2 how it might be slower than existing traditional recompilers such as Emu68 and UAE. While PJIT appears to live in a happy middle ground, there is one compelling reason why PJIT is better than either strategy – because PJIT is quicker than either of these methods. But what does that even mean?

My first introduction to "typography" was the typewriter. My mothers old typewriter is so engrained into my psyche that today a good Courier font can trigger the smell of ink in my mind (Courier Screenplay is probably the best, imho). My second introduction was with computers and playing with fonts on my Commodore 64, and a bit latter with all manner of fonts in wordprocessing programs like AppleWorks. Even well into the WYSIWYG era, quotes were stricly vertical.

Following a catastrophic loss of the bootloader work to my sheer negligence, I've gotten it back up to where I last left it. The bootloader is responsible for initializing the hardware and it has not been easy getting this far, but at the moment, everything is working except the 68K bus. That is, of course, the most important thing Buffee needs to do, but it sure wasn't everything the bootloader needs to do.

So we have a LOT on the go right now trying to stay ahead of the chip shortage. I'd like to say that it's coming to an end, but we all know that's not true. Some chips have started showing up on sites like DigiKey only to almost immediately disappear within days. It's shocking and it's probably still going to be late 2023 before this settles down.