From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <3ebe66e46b2d686c0b47607a294e5886@collyer.net> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] My Eu paper, mark 2 From: Geoff Collyer In-Reply-To: <200310101200.h9AC0A1c031067@ratthing-b246.strakt.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 15:11:39 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 6c6dd080-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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.