1 Mar
2025
1 Mar
'25
11:37 p.m.
On Sat, Mar 1, 2025 at 4:29 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
Larry, you can correct me here, but it was when Sun
finally wrote their
own - learning from DEC [and Masscomp] that the real Bill Wulf' Green book
style optimizer with its C compiler generated better code than the PCC
ones. Unfortunately, Sun's marketing (also ex-DEC) decided it could be a
revenue source. Unlike Masscomp, where we said to our ex-DEC marketing
types— "Charge for the Fortran if you want to, but C is part of the
system."
IIRC: Sun continued to bundled a simple C compiler so you build the
kernel, but it was trying to make $s on the compiler suite.
Yes. I think so. But I also think that said C compiler wasn't adequate to
bootstrap gcc or that there were extra steps / workarounds needed to do
that. This was during the K&R -> ANSI cutover that Sun did this as well,
and the old compiler was definitely K&R only.
SW economics can be difficult. Application firms
like CAD or tools
firms, of course, make all their money on their SW. But systems
companies make their money on the HW and need the compilers to generate the
applications to build the ecosystem to sell the HW. Funny thing, I have
always said huge reason BLISS lost was that DEC charged for $5000 per CPU
for it on TOPS or VMS, while C was free with UNIX - even though the
difference is the resulting code was remarkable. So many people stayed
away because they did not want to spend the extra $s.
Yea, BLISS might have been better, but making the case it was $5k per CPU
better was super hard.
Warner
On Sat, Mar 1, 2025 at 5:08 PM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Mar 1, 2025 at 5:01 PM Lyndon Nerenberg
(VE7TFX/VE6BBM)
<lyndon(a)orthanc.ca> wrote:
I believe that was in the shift to Solaris, aka SunOS 5.x. As I
recall, even the last versions of SunOS 4 came with a bundled compiler
(though it was pre-ANSI, and probably PCC based).
- Dan C.
segaloco via TUHS writes:
> Given that anything that obeys the ABI and has assembler entries to
the ker=
> nel
> can request services, it seems to me it would be possible to stand up
a
> user-land without C being present. Have any
UNIXen ever done this
after th=
e
advent of C?
SunOS 4.0 or 4.1 was when the Sun geniouses unbundled the C compiler
and made it a $$$ add on. That move single-handedly made GCC the
reference compiler moving forward.