Clang - what is the story?

[Julian H. Stacey]

Hi,
Reference:
> From:		Da Rock <freebsd-questions at herveybayaustralia.com.au> 
> Reply-to:	freebsd-questions at freebsd.org 
> Date:		Mon, 23 Jan 2012 01:13:49 +1000 
> Message-id:	<4F1C27AD.9070608 at herveybayaustralia.com.au> 

Da Rock wrote:
> On 01/23/12 00:38, Robert Bonomi wrote:
> > Da Rock<freebsd-questions at herveybayaustralia.com.au>  wrote:
> >
> >> I personally had no idea this was going on; my impression was gcc grew
> >> out of the original compiler that built unix, and the only choices were
> >> borland and gcc. The former for win32 crap and the latter for, well,
> >> everything else.
> > "Once upon a time", there were _many_ alternatives for C compilers.
> > Commercial -- i.e. 'you pay for it', or bundled with a pay O/S  -- offerings
> > included (this is a _partial_ list, ones _I_ have personal knowledge of):
> >
> >    PCC  -- (the original one0 medium-lousy code but the code-generator was
> >             easily adapted to new/diferent hardwre
> >    Green Hills Softwaware  (used by a number of unix hardare manufacturers)
> >    Sun Microsystems developed their own ("acc")
> >    Silicon Graphics, Inc
> >    Hewlett-Packard
> >    Symantic   (Think C -- notable for high-performance on early Apple Mac's,
> > 	      significantly better than Apple's own MPW)
> >    Manx Software   ("Aztec C" -- a 'best of breed' for MS-DOS)
> >    Microsoft
> >    Intel
> >    CCS
> >    Watcom
> >    Borland
> >    Zortech
> >    Greenleaf Software
> >    Ellis Computing (specializing in 'budget' compilers, circa $30 pricetags)
> >    "Small C"
> >    tcc -- the 'tiny C compiler
> Wow... I have some research to do...

Memories :-) 
I recall the Portable C compiler was not the original, There was
an earlier C native to PDP11, not portable; pcc was the rewrite to
make it portable at the expense of inefficiency.

Before C there was B
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_programming_language
  ( which had some relation to BCPL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCPL
    told me by Bob Eager, in Canterbury, Kent, England, decades back)

Yet another C compiler (or 2 ?):
  Munich, Germany, 1985:
  Siemens was already licensing a C compiler from an American chap,
  (I can't remember his name). Siemens shipped it with their Sinix,
  a Unix that ran on i386 & ns32000 series.  Their Sinix had
  translations integrated in seven human languages (my job).

  A few years on, Terry Carroll in Munich was trying to sell his own
  C compiler [bits (not sure if he got to a whole compiler)].

Cheers,
Julian
-- 
Julian Stacey, BSD Unix Linux C Sys Eng Consultants Munich http://berklix.com
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