1980s/1990s 68k C cross (and not so cross) compilers

[Toby Thain]

On 2015-11-25 1:41 PM, Phil Budne wrote:
> Brad Parker wrote:
>> ....  Remember sumex-aim ? SumMacC.
>> Anyway, I think the Kinetics fastpath was compiled with that....
>
> Perhaps originally....  But when the FastPath code arrived at Shiva it
> was using the SunOS 4 native compiler on Sun3.  I moved it to gcc on Sun4.
>
> The 6/88 KIP release has CC=/usr/stanford/bin/cc68
> Rutgers KIP c. 1989 used gcc
>
>> There was also that wacky company in cambridge which made a hybrid
>> c-compiler/c-interpreter.  It worked really well but it wasn't quite
>> right.  I loved the idea but never bought one.  That was around 1988,
>> 1989?  I always hoped to find the source code for that.
>
> Saber-C?  It became "Code Center" by Centerline.  Steve Kauffer kept it
> going while working on startups (TripAdvisor being the successful one).
> It ended up at ICS.COM: https://motif.ics.com/products/codecenter
>
> ISTR some product of that ilk that read and patched object code and
> only worked on RISC platforms...
>
>> I think gcc was the standard for 68k from 1987 on.  Yes, greenhills, but
>> it's not clear it produced better code and it was really expensive.
>
> I never dealt with that many 68K compilers.  I remember a whole slew
> of problematic compilers and debuggers on 32x32 (Encore) and ROMP (IBM
> PC/RT).  At least of them couldn't handle cfront output and/or "Duff's
> Device"

Yes. As I hinted in my earlier post on this, bad/buggy/unmaintained 
vendor compilers are a big part of why gcc came to exist.

And then much later, fittingly, it wiped them out and replaced most of 
them as a standard system compiler. :)

--Toby

>
> phil
>