1 Feb
2012
1 Feb
'12
2:09 p.m.
On 01/02/12 4:00 AM, Pontus Pihlgren wrote:
Reading this very interesting thread I got the malevolent idea to
implement a compliant C compiler which is as different from every other
as possible. Perhaps also for a fictional machine that also differs in
many ways from existing machines.
Before the turn of the millennium this would have been redundant, as the
differences between architectures and vendor compilers in that
heterogeneous area were *quite* sufficient for portability proofs and
disproofs. Look at the list of architectures supported by, say,
Mathematica in 1990 or 1995.
Of course, some still wrote code as if "all the world's VAX," followed
by "all the world's a SPARC," and of course we all know what the world
is now...
That is the environment from which gcc was born. It is still amazing to
me how completely gcc met its original goals, eventually supplanting
major vendor compilers (which many hoped for, but few could have
predicted in the 1980s).
--Toby
The purpose would be to show myself and others how
un-portable portable
code really is.
I think statement such as "this program is written to be portable" it
means portable in just one or a handfull of aspects.
E.g. "Portable regarding endianess"
"Has been compiled with GCC on two platforms"
/Pontus