[TUHS] 2.11 pcc with ANSI?

[Nick Downing]

I have a fair bit of experience in this area, I only recently started to
look at PCC but I have been in the guts of the Ritchie compiler for quite a
while. And, my first thought was exactly the same as yours -- OMG this is
archaic! This is unreadable! This is irritating! Modernize! Modernize!

So I have put huge efforts into exactly that, every now and again I create
a new repo and start the various conversions anew... having learned so much
about the structure of the code on the previous attempts and what
modernizations are appropriate/workable... however over the years I have
come to see that this, the "obvious" approach for people who love the early
PDP-11 systems and consider them more than just a toy/curiosity... is quite
misguided on a number of levels.

Firstly, there is always a lot of talk here about SysV being standardized
over BSD and blah bleh... I think a lot of people agree that BSD is/was
quite spare and elegant as compared with SysV being quite bloated and
clunky... result of being designed by committee rather than a few
passionate perfectionist engineer types. But what I don't see is the
equivalent discussion about why ANSI C was standardized over K&R. Like
everyone I took ANSI C more or less for granted and despite having briefly
used K&R on a Z80 when I first encountered C, I regarded ANSI C as a more
beautiful, more evolved, more useable/reliable language.

Recently I have applied a bit more analysis and have completely changed my
view, as I will explain. It seems to me the killer feature of ANSI C is
prototypes, so that argument conversions can be applied automatically if
you call another module passing unusual arguments (an int instead of a long
etc) and indeed the automatic conversions like pointer to/from int can be
curbed as being too eager (and they might be different sizes). This is
quite a good reason to use ANSI C, since arguably if it saves you an hour's
debugging time here and there, then it has paid for itself. But, it is
still debateable.

On the downside with ANSI C is the amount of useless new syntax and
keywords it introduces... char *const *restrict p; anyone?? It's hard to
think of more examples since these features are almost never used, but I
think you will find an ANSI C yacc grammar has twice as many productions
as, say, PCC's K&R grammar. The preprocessor gets a lot more bloat that
addresses rare corner cases and specialized usages... the added features
across the board are basically little more than convenience features and
syntactic sugar, yet they come at a huge cost IMO in terms of bloat, by
basically changing C compiler writing from something lots of people can
creatively hack on, into something that is usually only undertaken by well
funded commercial labs in practice.

To see what I mean consider Wirth's way of assessing language or compiler
features, he firstly assumes the compiler will be written in itself, then
asks whether the overall complexity of the system is improved or worsened
by a proposed feature. As I see it, It might save a line of code in 100
programs that use the compiler, but if the cost is 100 extra lines in the
compiler the net gain is zero. As a thought experiment consider taking
4.3BSD and then dropping GCC 5.0 into its /usr/src/lib directory, I think
you can agree the resulting system would be hopelessly out of balance since
there would be like 50,000 lines of code for kernel and utilities plus
another 250,000 for the compiler, more if you consider dependencies like
the assembler, linker, probably would need glibc too, etc etc. I would
say... NOT WORTHWHILE.

So in summary I think the self containedness of Unix is far more valuable
than anything ANSI C brings to the table. Plus if you think about it, Unix
already had lint, so ANSI C just solved the same problem differently while
forcing you to add reams of stupid boilerplate to your code whether you
want their solution or not. Much the same thing has happened with const
pointers, they have never to my knowledge statically flagged a bug in my
code, but they sure have ruined many edit/compile/link cycles by detecting
spurious or non problems. Plus the code is so much more verbose written
with const, it just isn't worth it considering the tininess of any gains.
Prototypes again... well if you think about it they introduce a clunky new
syntax that is only used in special places and is not consistent with the
rest of C...

So I am happily exploring an alternate universe in which C and Unix were
never standardized or the "right" version was standardized... and finding
it quite nice.

cheers, Nick

On 17/01/2017 2:33 PM, <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:

> Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> > On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 10:52:04AM -0800, Steve Johnson wrote:
> > >    It's been done.  Anders Magnusson has done quite a bit to port pcc
> and
> > >    add both ANSI and selected GCC features.
> >
> > A quick google search reveals:
> >
> > http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/
> > and https://www.openbsd.org/papers/magnusson_pcc.pdf
> > which is a set of slides on the work done.
> >
> > I've been itching to rewrite PDP-7 Unix in a higher level language.
> > I've already designed the language and written a compiler for the PDP-7
> > (see https://github.com/DoctorWkt/h-compiler), but the generated code
> sucks.
> > Maybe I should try to retarget PCC, it would be slightly ironic :-)
> >
> > Cheers, Warren
>
> That would be neat.
>
> For those of us who have moved on from CVS, I have mirror of the
> code at https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/pcc-revived.
>
> I tend to sync it with the CVS about once a week.  There hasn't been
> much activity on it in the past few weeks.
>
> It's noticeably faster than GCC but I wouldn't say 100x. :-)
>
> Arnold
>
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