Turbo

After Supercharge came Turbo, produced by a team including Gerry Jackson, Chas Dillon and Simon Goodwin. A huge effort went into producing this compiler, which produced faster code than either Supercharge or Q-Liberator.

It compiles most programs the major exception, for versions before 5.01, being its inability to allow parameters to be passed to machine code routines by reference. This restriction was removed in 2005, in version 5.01.

Turbo uses a dedicated toolkit of BASIC extensions called Turbo Toolkit. Turbo could produce stand-alone QL executables, but needed a runtime version of the Turbo Toolkit if it used toolkit extensions.

Unlike its predecessor Supercharge, Turbo never used the Lenslok system, the software protection was more by means of a large paper manual printed in black ink on red paper, which was difficult to photocopy, although uncomfortable to read. Turbo also did away with the need for software houses to purchase a license or pay any royalties for commercial programs compiled with Turbo, which was a major benefit over Supercharge.

Turbo was probably the biggest selling SuperBASIC compiler and often managed to generate substantial debate between Turbo aficionados and Q-Liberator users as to which was the best QL compiler! One of the main reasons for this debate was the fact that Q-Liberator was less strict over the SuperBASIC which it could compile, whereas both Supercharge and Turbo complained more about poor programming.

• PCW Benchmark 1: SuperBASIC 1.7, Turbo (floating point) 0.1, Turbo (Integers) 0.05 seconds
• PCW Benchmark 2: SuperBASIC 4.8, Turbo (floating point) 0.2, Turbo (Integers) 0.08 seconds
• PCW Benchmark 3: SuperBASIC 7.9, Turbo (floating point) 0.5, Turbo (Integers) 0.2 seconds
• PCW Benchmark 4: SuperBASIC 7.7, Turbo (floating point) 0.7, Turbo (Integers) 0.15 seconds
• PCW Benchmark 5: SuperBASIC 10.0, Turbo (floating point) 0.8, Turbo (Integers) 0.25 seconds
• PCW Benchmark 6: SuperBASIC 20.2, Turbo(floating point) 1.7, Turbo (Integers) 0.55 seconds
• PCW Benchmark 7: SuperBASIC 36.5, Turbo (floating point) 2.4, Turbo (Integers) 0.9 seconds
• PCW Benchmark Integer Math: SuperBASIC 10.4, Turbo (floating point) n/a, Turbo (Integers) 0.6 seconds
• PCW Benchmark Real Math: SuperBASIC 13.2, Turbo (floating point) 0.6 seconds, Turbo (Integers) n/a

Simon Goodwin did speak about adding a third phase to the program, which would sit between the parser and the code generator, in order to further optimise the code output. Unfortunately, this module was never released.

Turbo has continued to be maintained as a public domain program with thanks mainly to George Gwilt. To complement this version, a toolkit (TurboPTR) has also been released which allows you to interface Turbo compiled programs with the Pointer Environment.

Title: Turbo SuperBASIC Compiler
Language: Self-Compiled from BASIC plus some Machine Code
Author: Simon Goodwin, Gerry Jackson and Chas Dillon
Publisher: Digital Precision Ltd
Year of Publication: 1987
Platforms Suitable for: All Sinclair QLs and emulators
Commercial Status: Unknown
Price in July 1987: £99.95
Reviewed: Unknown
Commercial Status: Public Domain
Sources Available from: www.jms1.supanet.com
Latest Version available from: www.jms1.supanet.com