From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <19750d1b50c54941f031f57dc4be456e@proxima.alt.za>
To: 9fans@9fans.net
Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2013 12:24:07 +0200
From: lucio@proxima.alt.za
In-Reply-To: <20130323100519.GA3980@polynum.com>
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Subject: Re: [9fans] gcc not an option for Plan9
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 3072b4ea-ead8-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

> Except that C is a great language because it is both high
> level enough and low level (near machine) that a compiler written in C
> without optimizations and pure integer is "easy" (less expensive) to
> write from scratch. Here, the dependencies increase.

I wouldn't cry too many tears over GCC.  Having investigated Hogan's
port of GCC (3.0) to Plan 9, my impression is that GCC would never
really fit in with the Plan 9 paradigm, it is way too expensive and
unrewarding to bend it into shape, C++ notwithstanding.

Hence Go, together with the upgraded (if you want to call them that)
Plan 9 development tools.  I'm still of the opinion that a convergence
of the Plan 9 tools and the Go development can become the Esperanto of
information technology, given that ease of portability to foreign
architectures is a founding principle.  Only time will tell, sadly I
don't see any organisation or authoritative person recommending 8c et
al for development, where I expect that would be a step forward.

The obsession with optimisation, in part, is to be blamed, too.  But
not alone.

Just as a side note, I was hoping to port Plan 9 to the Olimex
LinuXino, one of many project that may or may not see the light of
day.  It comes with some or other variety of Linux, but has too little
memory (64MiB) to be more than an embedded prototyping system and the
default Linux release comes without the GCC development system.  It
struck me that the Go system could be cross-compiled for Linux/Arm on
my Plan 9 network and used on the LinuXino.  In fact, I have
implemented some small applications in this way although I have had no
occasion to do more than that.  If I could figure a way to compile the
Go distribution with its own tools, I may be able to prove that Go is
a viable release development system without GCC backing it, something
we have shown to a smaller audience with the Plan9/386 distribution.

++L