[TUHS] Any UNIX With No C In Userland?

[Warner Losh]

On Sat, Mar 1, 2025 at 4:29 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> Larry, you can correct me here, but it was when Sun finally wrote their
> own - learning from DEC [and Masscomp] that the real Bill Wulf' Green book
> style optimizer with its C compiler generated better code than the PCC
> ones.   Unfortunately, Sun's marketing (also ex-DEC) decided it could be a
> revenue source.  Unlike Masscomp, where we said to our ex-DEC marketing
> types— "Charge for the Fortran if you want to, but C is part of the
> system."
>
> IIRC: Sun continued to bundled a simple C compiler so you build the
> kernel, but it was trying to make $s on the compiler suite.
>

Yes. I think so. But I also think that said C compiler wasn't adequate to
bootstrap gcc or that there were extra steps / workarounds needed to do
that. This was during the K&R -> ANSI cutover that Sun did this as well,
and the old compiler was definitely K&R only.


>  SW economics can be difficult.   Application firms like CAD or tools
> firms, of course, make all their money on their SW.   But systems
> companies make their money on the HW and need the compilers to generate the
> applications to build the ecosystem to sell the HW.   Funny thing, I have
> always said huge reason BLISS lost was that DEC charged for $5000 per CPU
> for it on TOPS or VMS, while  C was free with UNIX - even though the
> difference is the resulting code was remarkable.   So many people stayed
> away because they did not want to spend the extra $s.
>

Yea, BLISS might have been better, but making the case it was $5k per CPU
better was super hard.

Warner

On Sat, Mar 1, 2025 at 5:08 PM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Mar 1, 2025 at 5:01 PM Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)
>> <lyndon at orthanc.ca> wrote:
>> > segaloco via TUHS writes:
>> > > Given that anything that obeys the ABI and has assembler entries to
>> the ker=
>> > > nel
>> > > can request services, it seems to me it would be possible to stand up
>> a
>> > > user-land without C being present.  Have any UNIXen ever done this
>> after th=
>> > > e
>> > > advent of C?
>> >
>> > SunOS 4.0 or 4.1 was when the Sun geniouses unbundled the C compiler
>> > and made it a $$$ add on.  That move single-handedly made GCC the
>> > reference compiler moving forward.
>>
>> I believe that was in the shift to Solaris, aka SunOS 5.x. As I
>> recall, even the last versions of SunOS 4 came with a bundled compiler
>> (though it was pre-ANSI, and probably PCC based).
>>
>>         - Dan C.
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20250301/faa0eb3f/attachment-0001.htm>