GCC for pdp11

[Paul Koning]

Gentlepeople,

Once in a while people ask about GCC.  It has long had pdp11 support, but it hasn't received much attention.  Recently I've done some cleanup on it, and some more is in the pipeline.

One notable new feature is that it can now produce proper DEC Macro-11 syntax output.  It has long had a -mdec-asm switch, but that used to produce GNU output.  Now it produces DEC output (and -mgnu-asm is how you get output for "gas".)

The optimizer is better, and a bunch of compiler failures are fixed.  Undoubtedly there are more bugs to be worked on.

Oh yes, for grins I told GCC to build not just a C compiler but a C++ and Fortran compiler as well.  That seems to work (but I get an error building the libstdc++ library).  I now have C++ translations of the RSTS standard header files common.mac and kernel.mac, and the DECnet definitions in netdef.sml.  :-)

If anyone wants to give this a try, the best way is to get the current code via Subversion (see gcc.gnu.org for details).  Alternatively, get a weekly snapshot; the DEC support is in the current latest, though some optimizer work will appear in the next one.

	paul