*BSD News Article 45223


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From: ralf@informatik.uni-koblenz.de (Ralf Baechle)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Berkeley Free CC? (Was: Re: Slight flame from Linux user)
Date: 8 Jun 1995 19:45:02 GMT
Organization: Uni Koblenz, Germany.
Lines: 38
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <3r7jvu$8bv@coli-gate.coli.uni-sb.de>
References: <3ql3gd$je2@bell.maths.tcd.ie> <D9K4Iz.BJM@midway.uchicago.edu>  <MMEAD.95Jun4013608@Glock.COM> <3qvojd$n14@park.uvsc.edu> <MMEAD.95Jun6155230@hq.ctr.vt.edu> <3r595f$h9t@fido.asd.sgi.com>
Reply-To: ralf@waldorf-gmbh.de
NNTP-Posting-Host: ozzy.uni-koblenz.de

In article <3r595f$h9t@fido.asd.sgi.com>, ls@barracuda.engr.sgi.com (Luigi Semenzato) writes:
|> In article <MMEAD.95Jun6155230@hq.ctr.vt.edu>, mmead@hq.ctr.vt.edu 
|> (matthew c. mead) writes:
|> 
|> 
|> |> >   ] GCC is a different story since there is (to my knowledge) no free
|> |> >   ] Berkeley licensed compiler.
|> |> 
|> |> >   There is.  It's just not hosted on as many platforms.  There some
|> 
|> I don't think so.
|> 
|> I recently got a ph.d. in CS from Berkeley, in the area of programming
|> languages and compilers.  The only Berkeley C compiler I ran into
|> is the Berkeley version of the Portable C Compiler, used in research
|> projects around 10 years ago, perhaps as recently as 7-8 years ago.
|> See, for instance, the Graham-Glanville code generator.  Kirk McKusick
|> (the main 4.2 BSD filesystem designer) also worked on it for his
|> ph.d. thesis on register allocation.
|> 
|> When the GNU compiler came out, the little support that pcc was getting
|> fizzled out rapidly. If there have been other C compiler projects I haven't 
|> heard of them.
|> 
|> So let's not get too excited about this.

There is yet another free compiler available (from my news article collection):

> There is a compiler named lcc, which you can get from ftp.cs.princeton.edu
> in pub/packages/lcc, that is ANSI compliant and is considerably smaller
> than gcc.  It appears to use a recursive descent parser, which may mean it
> can't have as high-quality error recovery as gcc can, but that's a minor
> issue.  It also doesn't optimize as well as gcc; in particular, I don't
> think register allocation works yet.

I didn't take a closer look at it, so...

  Ralf