[COFF] [TUHS] reviving a bit of WWB

[clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)]

Moving to COFF

On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 7:56 PM John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:

> Rereading that made me wonder: if someone retargeted an old compiler (pcc,
> say) to produce i386 code,
>
I thought SVR3's was PCC (maybe PCC2).  But I thought I remember that is
had a i386 code.  Certainly by SVR4 time.
IIRC, the time frame of SVR3's front end would have been original ANSI
(i.e. White Book V2).


> how much faster would it run than a VAX?
>
In the time frame of the SVR3 (mid/late 80s), the Intel processors was
faster than the 1MIP (780 circa 1977) in raw computes.  The issue was
always I/O.  Most PC did not have the same amount of I/O HW that much
earlier Vaxen.




> I see that there is a pcc derivative at <http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/>, but
> supposedly it has been heavily rewritten for C99 compliance and other
> things.
>
And my point is that by the time of C99, it was a different language than
the early 1970s when Dennis created fit or the original PDP-11/20  he and
Ken used for the first UNIX kernel and tools implementations.

"When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often
think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a
worldwide crowd." dmr
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