[TUHS] Lost Origins of the Plan 9 C Compiler

[Michaelian Ennis]

There is additional context about what was happening at the time in
Rob's talk at GopherCon 2016: Rob Pike - The Design of the Go
Assembler .

Ian


On Fri, Jan 5, 2024 at 3:34 AM Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> You shouldn't dismiss so lightly. The cited document answers the question of the first target, which was the National 32000. It ran on a Sequent multiprocessor, a machine we were thinking about using for other work.
>
> So no, it was not created on Research Unix, or at least not for it. We wanted a faster compiler for a number of reasons, and Ken had ideas about that. Because of its architecture, it was easy to port to other RISC architectures, such as the MIPS and SPARC, although both those machines had wrinkles that needed ironing out.
>
> -rob
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 5, 2024 at 10:05 PM Aram Hăvărneanu <aram.h at mgk.ro> wrote:
>>
>> > I think this may be what you are looking for:
>> > http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/new_c_compilers/
>>
>> Since I have worked on a derivative of the Plan 9 C compiler, I
>> assure you I have read all the available papers and documentation
>> about it and they answer none of the questions raised above.
>>
>> --
>> Aram Hăvărneanu