Re: [9fans] My Eu paper, mark 2

[Geoff Collyer <geoff@collyer.net>]

I believe dmr wrote the original C compiler by himself, without yacc.
pcc was written by Steve Johnson, with yacc, and I think he did it by
himself.  The plan 9 C compilers were written by Ken Thompson, with
yacc.  Ken claims that it takes 3 weeks to port his compiler (and
assembler and loader) to a new machine, but that's with Ken doing the
porting, working long days.  There are at least the 13 ports that I
know of.  Charles Forsyth did the power pc port (qc).  If LANL comes
through with money, I may end up porting it to the AMD K8.  lcc was
written by Dave Hanson and Chris Fraser; Norman Wilson has ported it
to the VAX.

I'm less sure about C++.  I think it was, at least initially, done by
Bjarne, with yacc.

Limbo was implemented by Sean Dorward, with yacc, I think unassisted.

f77 was written by Stu Feldman, with yacc, and with Peter Weinberger
contributing the Fortran libraries (e.g., for I/O).

There are undoubtedly compilers that I'm less familiar with that were
implemented by an army (probably IBM's compilers, at least in the old
days), but that was probably due to the habit of throwing armies at
problems rather than any real need.  I don't know how many people were
used to implement the full Algol 68 language either.  And MIPS's
compilers are elephantine, so it's likely that they had armies working
on them.