[TUHS] History of popularity of C
Toby Thain
toby at telegraphics.com.au
Fri May 22 09:45:36 AEST 2020
On 2020-05-21 4:56 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 12:17 PM Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au
> <mailto:toby at 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.
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