On Sun, Jan 6, 2019, 7:59 PM A. P. Garcia <a.phillip.garcia@gmail.com wrote:

On Sun, Jan 6, 2019, 9:39 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com wrote:

On Sun, Jan 6, 2019, 7:06 PM Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co wrote:
On Sun, 6 Jan 2019, A. P. Garcia wrote:

If not for GNU, Unix would still have been cloned. Net/2 happened in
parallel, did it not?

Berkeley actively rewrote most of unix yes. Net/1 was released about the same time GNU was getting started. Net/2 and later 4.4 BSD continued this trend, where 4.4 was finally a complete system. BSD386 only lagged Linux by about a year and had much stronger networking support, but supported fewer obscure devices than linux...

Warner

Ps I know this glosses over a lot, and isn't intended to be pedantic as to who got where first. Only they were about the same time... and I'm especially glossing over the AT&T suits, etc.

It's really hard to say. How would you compile it? Clang didn't come along until 2007. The Amsterdam Compiler Kit, perhaps?

The portable c compiler PCC was used to bootstrap a lot of this. It kinda sucked, but was decent enough. Early unix vendors used it on a variety of platforms. Here different universities produced different back ends. But there was no central clearing house. Gcc was a bit innovative in that it provided that, which allowed people to cooperate enough to make it better than PCC, at first. Then better or comparable to vendor compilers. Competition with gcc in large measure drove Sun to unbundle its compilers so there was a revenue stream that could be pointed at technology improvements. Somewhere between 4.3 and 4.4 BSD started using gcc over pcc since it was easier to distribute. The gnu project was important, but not because it rewrote the kernel. It provided the enabling compilers for that...

Warner