Clang - what is the story?

[Robert Bonomi]

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


I'm sure others can name ones I've overlooked.