From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=5.0 tests=MAILING_LIST_MULTI autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 28472 invoked from network); 2 Jan 2023 18:51:35 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (50.116.15.146) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 2 Jan 2023 18:51:35 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [IPv6:::1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4973742498; Tue, 3 Jan 2023 04:51:04 +1000 (AEST) Received: from mcvoy.com (mcvoy.com [192.169.23.250]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 75A9E42471 for ; Tue, 3 Jan 2023 04:50:59 +1000 (AEST) Received: by mcvoy.com (Postfix, from userid 3546) id 0B15535E848; Mon, 2 Jan 2023 10:50:54 -0800 (PST) Date: Mon, 2 Jan 2023 10:50:53 -0800 From: Larry McVoy To: COFF Message-ID: <20230102185053.GQ25547@mcvoy.com> References: <444D1F28-37A8-402A-874D-38507F2DE65D@gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <444D1F28-37A8-402A-874D-38507F2DE65D@gmail.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.24 (2015-08-30) Message-ID-Hash: YEPMV25ZPHOZEPGGP74R7EPIMAUDVHIM X-Message-ID-Hash: YEPMV25ZPHOZEPGGP74R7EPIMAUDVHIM X-MailFrom: lm@mcvoy.com X-Mailman-Rule-Misses: dmarc-mitigation; no-senders; approved; emergency; loop; banned-address; member-moderation; nonmember-moderation; administrivia; implicit-dest; max-recipients; max-size; news-moderation; no-subject; digests; suspicious-header X-Mailman-Version: 3.3.6b1 Precedence: list Subject: [COFF] Re: GCC boostrapper? Sort of a continuation of "a few comments..." List-Id: Computer Old Farts Forum Archived-At: List-Archive: List-Help: List-Owner: List-Post: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann or Gumby (aka David Henkel-Wallace) would know. It rings a bell but I'm not positive. On Mon, Jan 02, 2023 at 11:41:14AM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote: > So, all the shell-portability talk on TUHS reminds me of something I believe I saw back in the 90s, and then failed to find a few years ago when I went looking. > > But my Google-fu is not great, so maybe I just didn't look in the right place. > > I was trying to port Frotz to TOPS-20, because I wanted to run the Infocom games on TOPS-20 on an emulated PDP-10. (The only further causality to the chain was a warning in the Frotz sources that it assumed 8-bit bytes and if you wanted to try to port it to a 36-bit environment, good luck; this is the difference between "stuff I do fo fun" and "stuff that needs a business justification".) I had a K&R C compiler available, but the sources were all ANSI C. > > I had remembered that deprotoize had been part of an early GCC, and I did manage to find deprotoize sources, buried, I think, in some dusty piece of the Apple toolchain. But I also have a vague memory that GCC at some point probably in the mid-to-late 1990s came with something that was halfway between autoconf and Perl's bootstrapper. I *think* it was a bunch of shell scripts that could put together a minimal C subset compiler, which then could be used to build the rest of GCC. I'm pretty sure it was released as a reaction to the unbundling of C compilers when Unix vendors realized that was a thing they could do. > > I could not find that thing at all. > > Did I hallucinate it? It seems like it would have been an immensely useful tool at the time. > > I ended up writing my own very half-assed deprotoizer and symbol mangler (only the first six characters of the function name were significant, because that's how the TOPS-20 linker works, and I don't know that I could have gotten past that even with an ANSI compiler without having to do significant toolchain work) which got me over the hump, but I have remained curious whether there really was that nifty GCC bootstrapper or whether I made that up. > > Adam -- --- Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat