Re: [9fans] gcc on plan9

[geoff@collyer.net]

I use f2c when I need to compile Fortran (or, more likely, Ratfor).
Have GNU extended Fortran too?  Or do you need to compile programs
that make use of features added to Fortran by later standards (though
I'm not sure that GNU Fortran will help here)?

I guess I don't see what's so offensive about rio and acme.  A hazard
is that once one starts adding things to attract novice users (e.g.,
shiney things) or people who are used to some particular (l)unix
configuration (e.g., windows managers, graphical toolkits, the GNU
world), the resulting system will be bigger, slower and clumsier.  If
you use gcc routinely, you lose the speed of 8c.  As an example of the
cumulative effect of such accretion, a friend reported compiling a Red
Hat kernel from scratch recently and it only took about an hour (vs.
the 10 minutes it took to compile V6 in 1977 on slow disks, or the 85
seconds to compile 9pc on oldish PC hardware today).

It may not be feasible, for example due to gcc's asm constructs, but
it would seem more satisfying to write a gcc-to-c preprocessor.  Of
course that doesn't help with C++; if only we had a Cfront for current
C++.