[TUHS] History of non-Bell C compilers?

[Paul Ruizendaal]

> On 11 Mar 2024, at 18:12, Paul Ruizendaal <pnr at planet.nl> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Mar 7, 2024, 4:14 PM Tom Lyon <pugs78 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> For no good reason, I've been wondering about the early history of C
>> compilers that were not derived from Ritchie, Johnson, and Snyder at Bell.
>> Especially for x86.  Anyone have tales?
>> Were any of those compilers ever used to port UNIX?
> 
> An unusual one would be the “revenue bomb” compiler that Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie did at Microsoft in 1981.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> I think the compiler also had a Xenix port, maybe it even was Xenix native (and at this time, Xenix would still essentially have been V7).

I was pointed to the book “Writing Solid Code”, Microsoft Press ISBN 1-55615-551-4. In the foreword it says:

"The system we used to develop Multiplan was pretty sophisticated for PC development in those days. We wrote the core product in C - most programs then were written in assembly or Pascal. We did our editing and compilation on a PDP-11 running Unix. The C code was compiled into p-code and downloaded to the target machines. We had to build p-code interpreters for each microprocessor in use at that time. By the end of 1983, we had interpreters working for the 8080/Z80, the 6502, the Z8000, the 68000, the 9900, and the 8086.”

So the Simonyi compiler was Xenix/Unix native.

The specs for its p-code interpreter can be found here:
https://forums.atariage.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=887196
https://forums.atariage.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=887197