22 Sep
2020
22 Sep
'20
9:33 p.m.
Moving to COFF
On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 7:56 PM John Cowan <cowan(a)ccil.org> wrote:
Rereading that made me wonder: if someone retargeted
an old compiler (pcc,
say) to produce i386 code,
I thought SVR3's was PCC (maybe PCC2). But I thought I remember that is
had a i386 code. Certainly by SVR4 time.
IIRC, the time frame of SVR3's front end would have been original ANSI
(i.e. White Book V2).
how much faster would it run than a VAX?
In the time frame of the SVR3 (mid/late 80s), the Intel processors was
faster than the 1MIP (780 circa 1977) in raw computes. The issue was
always I/O. Most PC did not have the same amount of I/O HW that much
earlier Vaxen.
I see that there is a pcc derivative at
<http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/>, but
supposedly it has been heavily rewritten for C99 compliance and other
things.
And my point is that by the time of C99, it was a different language than
the early 1970s when Dennis created fit or the original PDP-11/20 he and
Ken used for the first UNIX kernel and tools implementations.
"When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often
think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a
worldwide crowd." dmr