[9fans] gcc

[9fans] gcc

[Winston Kodogo]

I regret that you regret responding, and hope that you will relent.
It's always refreshing to hear from curmudgeons with quite a few more
clues than oneself.  I'm not sure if I'm the public exactly, but I do
find mk and make too labour-intensive for my tastes.  I'm now an IDE
kind of guy, having started out using Fortran IV on a 300 baud
teletype as a contemporary of Barmy Shoestring, and having moved on to
Microsoft Visual Studio, which, in its 2008 incarnation, the last good
one, I actually liked. So shoot me. But I've also learnt to value the
terseness of the command line, and have been, in many ways, vastly
more productive using tips on this list, and also from "The Unix
Programming Environment". Each to their own - there is no one set of
tools that suits everyone. Xcode increasingly works for me. And how
many of the youth have read Fowler?

> Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2013 12:43:24 -0700
> From: Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com>
> To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
> Subject: Re: [9fans] gcc not an option for Plan9
> Message-ID:
>         <CAKzdPgxqU230QEku_rcUPgmE0SoQ1nee+wOYe0TzZ2PZW9nQhQ@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> I just did a go install, after a clean, of the biggest binary I'm
> working on, using my pokey old mac laptop. It took 0.9 seconds, most
> of which was spent in 6l and not the go tool. It could be faster, but
> it's plenty fast enough.
>
> The public won't use mk or make. If you want to succeed in the world,
> you need to find a more modern way to build software. It's been clear
> for a long time that that is not a relevant criterion for this
> community any more, and although it makes me sad I have moved on.
>
> I regret responding to this thread, and will move on there, too.
>
> -rob
>

Re: [9fans] Rant (was Re: Plan9 and Ada95?)

[David Gordon Hogan]

> On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 12:54:15PM -0500, David Gordon Hogan wrote:
> >
> > It's not.  If anything, it's worse.
>
> That's cheap.  Much as I can easily agree that GNU bloat can be
> improved on, I don't see anyone getting it right.
>
> Maybe the approach is flawed, but the results are out there.  Unlike
> Plan 9's ?c, GCC has to deal not only with different architectures,
> but also different operating systems.
>
> The above comment is a symptom of a Plan 9 syndrome I, for one, am
> not proud of: "we didn't contribute to it, it can't be any good".

No, it's a symptom of ``I wasted weeks of my life struggling
with this awful code''.

> In the meantime, if I want to cross-develop for Windows or Linux,
> or any other established platforms, Plan 9 is just no use to me,
> while GCC and its offspring are.  I know what my choice would be,
> but it's no choice, is it?  Oh, I forget the Inferno tools, those

GCC (Cygnus) is useless for Windows.  There's no way to link
a VXD!  So if you're doing any _serious_ development, are you
going to use two compilers, just so you can have the dubious
pleasure of using GCC?  I don't think so.

I'm sorry to be so ascerbic here, but I am sick of hearing people
defending GCC.

Why don't you help us improve the Inferno tools instead of
complaining about them?

> Sorry for the rant, I really don't mean it in a personal fashion,
> but I also fail to see the benefit of just criticising without
> providing any suggestions on _how_ to improve the things that are
> being criticised.  Like, you can't exactly remove GCC from today's
> development environment, what will you put in its place?  Across
> the board?

You want suggestions?  We could force all those GNU people to read
Rob's essay on programming style, for starters.

I have a cunning plan to use 8c to generate files that will
run under Windows 9x/Me.  Stay tuned...

Yes, you'll have to use MS compilers for the VXD and EXE
that get the show started, but that's it.  Unlike GCC, the
pleasure of using 8c is real.

I don't know about Nt/XP yet, but I'm guessing that they'll
be harder.

[9fans] GCC

[suspect]

On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, David Gordon Hogan wrote:
>
> No, it's a symptom of ``I wasted weeks of my life struggling
> with this awful code''.

Amidst all this clamor, I must ask: Why did you take the time to port
GCC ? Was it done under duress ?
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