>
> I doubt very much that using the Plan 9 C compilers will bring much
> additional benefit for finding bugs (except bugs in the compiler!).


The cross-file type-checking does sometimes pick up unpleasantness caused
by type mismatches.
It was originally added to allow dynamically-loaded object modules to be
checked against the loading specification.
It has found a few problems elsewhere, including one in Python where one .c
file included a .h with a certain #define
in scope that another .c file didn't define by accident, causing the two .c
files to have completely different memory layouts
for a structure.


> Out of curiousity, why is linking against the system libraries so
> hard?  I assume a port of kenc to Linux would have a driver program
> that would just invoke the system ld(1).  I'd think that getting
> the ABI and generation of ELF (or of standard Linux assembly language)
> correct would be the hard part.
> What am I missing?


It works very differently from what you expect
http://9p.io/sys/doc/compiler.html  <http://9p.io/sys/doc/compiler.html>:

The compiler is a single program that produces an object file. Combined in
the compiler are the traditional roles of preprocessor, lexical analyzer,
parser, code generator, local optimizer, and first half of the assembler.
The object files are binary forms of assembly language, similar to what
might be passed between the first and second passes of an assembler.

Object files and libraries are combined by a loader program to produce the
executable binary. The loader combines the roles of second half of the
assembler, global optimizer, and loader.

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