On Sat, Mar 1, 2025 at 4:29 PM Clem Cole <clemc@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@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Mar 1, 2025 at 5:01 PM Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)
<lyndon@orthanc.ca> wrote:
> 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.

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.