[TUHS] Re: Any UNIX With No C In Userland?

On 3/1/25 3:38 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: Time has fogged the memories but I'll try. As has been noted, SunOS 4.x continued to ship a cc sufficient to build the kernel but which didn't otherwise track the language evolution going on. The unbundled tools were introduced to deliver those and, in a theory about the value of software, to earn the necessary investments by generating a return. It wasn't just marketing being revenue vampires though it presented an opportunity for feeding. There was a good bit of investment / change in the tools in this period. The SVR4 work brought the ANSI C front end from AT&T, FORTRAN technology purchases/licenses occurred, there was something going on with Pascal that I don't recall at the moment. Some of the investment was necessitated by the shift to SPARC and the demands that RISC posed on the code generation software. The appeal that these things must be done because they're necessary to have good and credible products was countered with a business sentiment that the value should manifest as a return visible in $. So I recall it as more textured than just "let's squeeze some $'s" but especially if you have the view that "C is part of the system" it's an affront. On 3/1/25 5:17 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: One of Sun's charms was a "let many flowers bloom, even if they contradict themselves" kind of culture. Sometimes this yielded successes and opportunities. Sometimes it resulted in frictions and periodic culls. (The "all the wood behind one arrow" SPARC focus was one such consequence, when the array of 68K, 386, and SPARC products got too logistically cacophonous and Sun blew a revenue projection in [I think] the last FY1989 quarter. The cacophony wasn't in engineering so much as the rest of the business: sales forecasting, manufacturing, support, ISV relationships. etc.) "Many flowers bloom" thinking wasn't restricted to just technology and extended to business models. The thinking that "investments should follow the revenue" visible in the tools unbundling along with additional influences led to the "planets" reorganization of Sun (e.g., SunSoft, SunPro, etc.) where inter-unit pricing and therefore revenues would demonstrate where value was derived. Sun's R&D levels were always higher than conventional business wisdom said they should be so rationalizing them drove such thinking. Whatever the merits of the planets model in theory were, they were completely lost in the execution. The implementation looked more like the State Planning Committee of the Soviet Union than Wall Street. The company focused inward rather than outward to the market for a while before the whole thing was relaxed back to something more "normal". Definitely one of the worst self-inflicted wounds in the company's history. IMO, such failures emerged from the same environment that permitted the exploration of unusual ideas and the taking of big swings. Sun was probably better off and certainly more impactful, fun, and interesting for being that way even at the cost of some dramatic face plants.