22 May
2020
22 May
'20
5:45 a.m.
On 2020-05-21 4:56 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 12:17 PM Toby Thain <toby(a)telegraphics.com.au
<mailto:toby@telegraphics.com.au>> wrote:
- inexpensive compiler availability was not very good until ~1990
orlater,
Hrrumpt The Gnu C compiler was starting to be available by the
mid-1980s in alpha/beta form. rms was looking for places to start. He
Right, things were changing, but costly C compilers were a reality well
into the 90s, unless your use case happened to coincide with a gcc port.
And the reason this matters is that it contradicts the "C is popular
because compilers were easy" assertion. Not "easy", and not necessarily
cheap or free either.
approached a number of folks, from Tanenbaum to some
of the vendors (he
knew Masscomp had written a compiler from scratch which we away the
binaries gave to our customers and he called me asking if we would
donate it. We had donated development hardware and I was still his
contact to the Gnu project at that point).
As far as I know, he ended up writing his own because he could not find
one to start with. ...
but C had been taking off like wildfire for 10 years before that
At least 15 years before. By 1975, it was a solid fixture at most
Universities.
Yes. I should have said "more than 10" :-)
--Toby
- by the time gcc was mature (by some definition, but probably
before1990)
Mature is the key word here. gcc does not really start to mature until
Cygnus takes it over. But it was quite usable for the systems that
targetted it.