[TUHS] Compilers (was Re: Any UNIX With No C In Userland?)

[Warner Losh]

On Sat, Mar 1, 2025 at 4:47 PM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 1, 2025 at 6:37 PM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> It's been years but I remember bootstrapping gcc with the `cc` that
> came with SunOS (was it in /usr/ucb? For some reason that sticks in my
> memory). I don't recall additional workaround steps, though perhaps
> one had to install other GNU utilities?
>

That may be what I'm recalling... you needed gmake, binutils, bison, flex
and maybe a few others for sure... I also recall that 1.x was a lot harder
to get going than 2.x on sparc.


> Gcc got you ANSI and some amount of compatibility with C++ (which
> hadn't yet been standardized). I can't remember if Objective-C was in
> gcc at the time yet, but I suspect it was via NeXT. But beyond raw
> language compatibility, I don't remember it being a very good compiler
> at the time. It didn't really start to become competitive until GCC 3
> or so.
>

Yea, even gcc2 was a huge win.


> >>  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.
>
> People doing HPC locally used to pay for better commercial compilers;
> GCC and Clang have definitely caught up now, but I'm sure they were
> only concerned with Fortran at the time. The Portland Group compiler
> was pretty darned good in the mid-90s when we were starting to look at
> cheap x86 boxes because of the price/performance ratio: even though
> the big RISC machines were still better in terms of absolute numbers,
> they were clearly losing the battle on the cost ratio.
>

Yea. There comes a point where large swarms of adequate at a reasonable
price is a better call than a few, more expensive things that get the job
done
in a smaller footprint of floor space or time (but higher cost). For a lot
of things
that crossover took place in the 2000-2010 time frame.

Warner


>         - Dan C.
>
> >> 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.
>
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