21 Feb
2020
21 Feb
'20
5:45 a.m.
On Wed, Feb 19, 2020 at 11:18:53AM -0900, Michael Huff wrote:
It was said earlier that SunOS included a compiler,
but it was dropped
in Solaris. Was it possible for people to carry over the old SunOS
compiler and use it on Solaris? Did people do that, or did they just
have their companies spring for the actual Solaris compiler?
SunOS's compiler that shipped with it wasn't that usable. It didn't fully
support
the C standards at the time.
It was used primarily for two things.
*) To compile the few kernel objects that were shipped as source & to
link in all the binary objects into one new kernel for patching/tuning.
*) To bootstrap GCC so one had a usable compiler to build packages. GCC
had special code used for the bootstrap process specificly at the time
on SunOS, written in a level that the SunOS compiler could deal with.
Otherwise, it could only be used for simple projects.
As others stated, the output of the compiler would have been a.out, and
not ELF like Solaris 2.x would have needed.
Some people equate SunOS from a time when all Unices still had (usable) compilers,
but that was actually an earlier time frame. Sun was selling its
standards compliant compilers for SunOS before Solaris 2.x was around.