From: Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com>
To: Win Treese <treese@acm.org>
Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] DEC Compilers (was: Re: SDB debugger
Date: Tue, 5 May 2020 17:49:11 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAEdTPBeMCYNKRRyCSKBd7YkuWO9Ek+i+Jtg-skFzJGdMgTDRuQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <8D548BBE-AB7A-457E-87F8-F3718A9AC4B7@acm.org>
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On Mon, 4 May 2020 at 20:33, Win Treese <treese@acm.org> wrote:
>
> > On May 3, 2020, at 4:26 PM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> >
> > Anyway back to compilers, Tru64 had a 'good enough' compiler based on
> the MIPS code base to get us all going, but GEM's primary target was VMS
> since one of the important features of GEM was the VAX->Alpha transpiler
> technology. VMS was still heavily written in VAX Assembler at the time.
> Plus, It actually was a little hairy because GEM had a new C/C++
> front-end. So TLE's high order bit was VMS for the Alphas. GEM for
> Tru64 was about 18 months later.
>
> In the early days of Alpha, I was at DEC’s Cambridge Research Laboratory
> (directed then by Vic Vyssotsky, having retired from Bell Labs). The lab
> had various connections to Alpha projects, and we learned that there were
> (I think) 7 different C compilers running on the early port of Ultrix. That
> number, I think, did not include the port of gcc that DEC was funding
> outside the company.
>
> Andy Payne, a recent hire at the lab, had been an intern in DEC’s
> semiconductor group, where he had worked on randomized testing for hardware
> verification. With all the compilers available, he decided to hack up a
> program to generate random small C programs with computable expected
> outputs. His program then compiled the random code with each compiler and
> tested the result. After finding a number of bugs this way, he got tired of
> submitting the bug reports, and changed his program to write and submit the
> bug reports automatically.
>
> This caused a little bit of consternation with some of the compiler teams
> at first.
>
> Eventually, this led to some collaboration with the DEC languages and
> tools team, and Bill McKeeman published a paper that line of work in the
> Digital Technical Journal in 1998[1].
>
> - Win
>
> [1] https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol10num1/vol10num1art9.pdf
Does this software still exist anywhere? The link to the download is long
gone, archive.org did not preserve the download, and I had no success
finding the files on the web.
-Henry
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-05-05 21:49 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 26+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-05-01 20:48 [TUHS] " Paul Ruizendaal
2020-05-01 21:57 ` Clem Cole
2020-05-02 9:10 ` Paul Ruizendaal
2020-05-02 16:04 ` Clem Cole
2020-05-01 23:05 ` Jeremy C. Reed
2020-05-02 0:49 ` Noel Hunt
2020-05-02 1:22 ` Rob Pike
2020-05-02 3:49 ` Noel Hunt
2020-05-02 20:16 ` Paul Ruizendaal
2020-05-03 6:58 ` arnold
2020-05-03 16:13 ` Clem Cole
2020-05-03 16:53 ` Henry Bent
2020-05-03 17:06 ` Henry Bent
2020-05-03 17:13 ` Henry Bent
2020-05-03 20:26 ` Clem Cole
2020-05-05 0:22 ` [TUHS] DEC Compilers (was: " Win Treese
2020-05-05 17:36 ` Paul Winalski
2020-05-05 18:53 ` Dr Iain Maoileoin
2020-05-05 21:59 ` Dan Cross
2020-05-05 21:49 ` Henry Bent [this message]
2020-05-03 17:35 ` [TUHS] " Paul Winalski
2020-05-03 21:27 ` Paul Ruizendaal
2020-05-12 4:15 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-05-06 2:52 [TUHS] DEC Compilers (was: " Doug McIlroy
2020-05-06 15:53 Doug McIlroy
2020-05-06 20:21 ` Tim Rylance
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