[TUHS] gcc-3.4.6 and old unix

Peter Jeremy peterjeremy at optushome.com.au
Mon Apr 24 10:00:46 AEST 2006


On Sun, 2006-Apr-23 19:27:55 -0400, Bill Cunningham wrote:
>    Has anyone thought of or tried to port the gcc to the old unixes?

What do you mean by "old unixes"?  32V or 4BSD would be trivial.  2BSD
or V7 (or earlier) would be virtually impossible.  gcc was born in a
32-bit world and there's no way you will get it to work natively on a
16-bit host (though it does have a PDP-11 backend):  Both the code and
data structures assume a large memory space and are not amenable to
using overlays.

If you really wanted to run gcc on a PDP-11, the easiest (though very
slow) solution would be to build a simple 32-bit virtual machine that
runs on the PDP-11 and run gcc within it.

> A C compiler that would work with modern c89 or c99.

As far as I can tell, C99 was deliberately designed to make it
impossible to build a simple C compiler.

-- 
Peter Jeremy



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