------- Comment #11 from malitzke at metronets dot com 2007-05-19 02:02 ------- Well, this is getting funny.
You and apparently others at gcc are looking at the computer-sofware world through a high powered telescope and in this drastically reduced field of vision you-all only see gcc. I refreshed my memory and the linux-kernel admits other compilers besides gcc, specifically for the arm hardware. It so happens that I started with UNIX using the Seventh Edition (late seventies) By the time of the Seventh Edition everything in Unix depended on the Ritchie assembler and the Ritchie C compiler. With the Intel i386 and the Compaq 386 I migrated to the SCO Xenix (an amalgamation of the AT&T kernel and AT&T UNIX utilities utilities plus some BSD stuff like vi and an absolutely lousy Microsoft C compiler. Even so I managed to migrate with this compiler to the Public Domain Korn Shell (pdksh). In order to get to bash I had to hack gcc to produce xout object code (really *.s files) as the libraries were all in that xout format and to port the BSD libraries was too much work for one person. Therfore I learnt to patch gcc., and got bash as a result. I also played with the GNU utilities, but the original Unix ulities were quite adequate. This cozy little world collapsed when gcc underwent a complete rewite from gcc-2.58 to gcc-2.60 (no patches). The salvation was in the then quite early linux kernel. But I had to hack the kernel to read the Xenix formatted hard drives with their hermaphroditic addressing. (the linux kernel to his day sports some drivers for Xenix SYSV and Coherent, but at least for Xenix these drivers work only on floppies. Thus I became probaly one the few persons, who hacked both gcc and linux. At the same time I made MS-DOS livable using the Canadian Mortice Kern (UNIX emulation) package. I cheerfully admit to some biases one of which is that outstanding programmers like Ritchie, Torvalds, Stallmann were also accomplished assembly language programmers and that C is really a high level and portable assembly language. I really do not like all the stuff piled on top of the good old C. In the end, some of the stuff I hear about things like libgcc just make me smile. I have to say that me writing this brought me some joy, probaly much more than it has for somebody reading this. -- http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=31990
