1 Mar
2025
1 Mar
'25
11:46 p.m.
On Saturday, March 1st, 2025 at 3:37 PM, Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
On Sat, Mar 1, 2025 at 4:29 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
I don't think like a business type, but to my mind cheap-to-free, accessible
development tools are a no-brainer. More surface area for devs means more devs able to
target your system means more likelihood of killer apps showing up on your platform. If
it's locked up so tight nobody can sustainably write software, then the lifeblood of
your OS goes down the tubes. Again though, not claiming to be an expert on the business
side of things, restrictive dev tool access just echoes of the same gripes I have with
hardware IP for which the interfaces/datasheets are under expensive and arcane NDAs.
Like, okay, thanks for making the risk of evaluating your platform untenable for a large
tract of the software community I guess...eval boards are already expensive enough.
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.
- Matt G.
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