2 Mar
2025
2 Mar
'25
4:35 p.m.
On 2025-03-01 21:43, Dan Cross wrote:
On Sat, Mar 1, 2025 at 7:21 PM Charles H Sauer
(he/him)
<sauer(a)technologists.com> wrote:
Some decades ago, I was checking whether our product ran properly on AIX
(version forgotten). The xlc man page stated that at the highest
optimisation level, the "semantics of the source code might not be
respected" (or something very similar). I no longer remember the
versions. Has anyone else seen this?
S.
On 3/1/2025 5:46 PM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
As I recall, you needed a license for the compiler suite on AIX 3; the
compiler was XL C, and was very highly regarded (other compilers in
the same general family were XL C++ and XL Fortran). By AIX 4 this was
definitely true.
- Dan C.
But I digress, I seem to recall reading in
another thread here that AIX may have had a fair deal of IBM stuff like perhaps some PL/I
or PL/S down in the guts of significant chunks at one point, but I couldn't speak to
that with any authority. I could see IBM what with their legacy in languages bristling at
letting C be the star of the show.
For all our faults in the AIX team and IBM in general, there was no
desire to have legacy IBM languages as primary in AIX.
https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2017/03/08/lets-start-at-the-very-beg…
tries to explain why PL.8 code existed in early AIX and how PL.8 code
was eliminated in AIX 3 development.
AIX for the RT 1&2 bundled pcc (with the HCR optimization phase in AIX 2).
Since I left IBM in the midst of AIX 3 development, I'm not certain what
happened with compilers after I left. Part of the confusion was IBM
Toronto rewriting the Yorktown Research compiler to be a "product
worthy" C compiler. There may have been desire to gain revenue for the
Toronto compiler, but I assume that some some C compiler was bundled in
AIX 3.