Also, C++ uses a lot more memory, which can also be a no-go when you get as little as 32kb for code+data, luckily with in-place execution.
Depends on how you use it. "If you don't use it, you don't pay for it" is the C++ philosophy. If you use it as "C with objects", it should use no more memory than C with structs. If you use it as "C with polymorphism", it should use no more memory than C with function pointers.
CppCon 2016: Jason Turner “Rich Code for Tiny Computers: A Simple Commodore 64 Game in C++17”
Never cared for C beyond using it in Turbo C 2.0 for MS-DOS, and later when required to use it for university projects and client projects that explicitly required ANSI C89.
So it wasn't 64 KB, but it was perfectly usable on 640 KB systems.
The main problem has always been fighting misconceptions.
Uh. That's a pretty obvious one.
Sometimes using address generation ports is preferable to ALU ports.
Also 'lea' can load the result in a different register from both operands, 'add' will always need to modify a register.
People have been using 'lea' for calculations since dawn of time, for example:
shl ebx, 6
lea edi, [ebx*4 + ebx + 0xa0000]
add edi, eax
This was a common way in DOS days for calculating pixel address in mode 0x13.
> you can actually figure out in your head what the assembly will look like
I keep hearing this, and I don't buy it. Did you know that `gcc -O3` will turn `int add(int x, int y) { return a + b; }` into an `lea` instruction? I doubt many people do.
And it's not like the compiler will magically switch to emitting different instructions if you compile the code above as C++...