[TUHS] Re: History of non-Bell C compilers?

["Greg A. Woods" <woods@robohack.ca>]

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At Thu, 7 Mar 2024 17:24:11 -0700, Marc Rochkind <mrochkind@gmail.com> wrote:
Subject: [TUHS] Re: History of non-Bell C compilers?
>
> Then I got an IBM PC in 1982, with an 8088 (16-bit word, 8-bit bus), and
> I'm pretty sure the first real C compiler was Lattice C. Microsoft picked
> it up and called it Microsoft C. Then, maybe a couple of years later, they
> came out with their own C compiler, written in-house, I think. (As I
> recall, I got my Lattice C compiler, which was very expensive, for free for
> writing a review for BYTE Magazine, but I can't find the review in my
> office or online, so maybe I'm imagining that. Or maybe I never finished
> the review or they didn't print it.)

Oh, Lattice C!  The one compiler I came to hate.  It was rather buggy
and had many incompatibilities and difficulties if one was already
accustomed to using writing C on Unix.  Microsoft C in its early days
post-Lattice was somewhat less buggy, but still a bane to use, even on
Xenix where the libraries were more "complete".

I don't think the Mark Williams C compiler has been mentioned in this
thread yet.  It was of course the same one created for and used in their
Coherent system, but it was also released for various systems including
MS-DOS it was a pure joy to use.  It was extremely compatible with Unix
C of the day (having been created to build a Unix clone, and on a PDP-11
no less), and equally reliable, and came with many additional
command-line tools that were similarly familiar.

I wrote more about my experiences with some non-Unix compilers back a
few years ago in a tangentially related thread:

      https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2020-May/021231.html

--
					Greg A. Woods <gwoods@acm.org>

Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>     Avoncote Farms <woods@avoncote.ca>

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