12 Jun
2023
12 Jun
'23
8:58 p.m.
On 6/12/23, Chris Pinnock via TUHS <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
It may be that crt stood for "compiler run time" back when C was the
only compiler in town. But once you get another language, such as
Fortran, that has its own, different runtime initialization
requirements, having the 'c' in crt0 mean "C" rather than
"compiler"
because it's no longer common to all compiler run time libraries.
-Paul W.
On 12 Jun 2023, at 21:22, Dan Cross
<crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hmm. The comment at the top of `crt0.s` from 2nd Edition says, "C
runtime startoff", which seems pretty clear. Whether that has changed
over time is, of course, another matter (like how GCC changed to "GNU
Compiler Collection").
Possibly - in this file
http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/lib/csu/README?rev=1.6&content-…,
the CSU and related files are referred to as the compiler runtime. But
startoff is appropriate - because the file was usually included in the
binary at the beginning to initialise stuff.