Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!usc!ucsd!ucbvax!AEARN.BITNET!K312240
From: K312240@AEARN.BITNET (Klaus Kusche)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
Subject: Maple and others: Lack of good C compiler!!!
Message-ID: <9005280913.AA10653@tcgould.TN.CORNELL.EDU>
Date: 28 May 90 15:12:32 GMT
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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Dear Mailing List:

About Rick Stein's mail concerning parallelizing Maple:

This is reasonable (Stephen Watt has parallelized Maple in 1986 on a
network of VAXen as his PhD thesis), and we will most likely do that
again in the near future, too.

However, we will most likely not do it on transputers. The reason for
that is not specific to Maple, but also impedes porting of many
other interesting systems (Lisp's, Prolog's, expert systems, ...)
which are written in C and in public domain for the academia:

*** As long as there is no C compiler for transputers which compiles
several ten thousand lines of standard Unix C code without modification
and troubles, and generates reasonably efficient (and correct!) code,
and comes with Unix-compatible libraries, such ports will not happen!
They are not worth the trouble! ***

A few examples:

With Inmos parallel C, even XLISP (which is completely trivial code
and compiles even on the most primitive toy C compilers) requires
(for some mysterious reasons, the compiler just gives some misleading
error messages for obviously correct and not at all tricky code parts)
about a dozen source code changes.

I was told that currently no C compiler for transputers exists which
is able to compile the Unix distribution of TeX without too much hassle.

...

If someone has experience in getting large Unix C applications to run
on transputers (or failed to do so), please post!

We are about to switch most of our work (except for the Strand-based
projects) from transputers to some boxes which can be used and
programmed, too.

************************************************************************
* Klaus Kusche                                                         *
* Research Institute for Symbolic Computation                          *
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