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From: fouts@orville.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Porting GCC to Atari ST
Message-ID: <1090@ames.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 30-Mar-87 16:33:48 EST
Article-I.D.: ames.1090
Posted: Mon Mar 30 16:33:48 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 1-Apr-87 00:43:25 EST
References: <3450@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> <975@ames.UUCP> <2822@mit-hermes.AI.MIT.EDU> <1014@ames.UUCP> <2824@mit-hermes.AI.MIT.EDU>
Sender: usenet@ames.UUCP
Reply-To: fouts@orville.UUCP (Marty Fouts)
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 65
Keywords: C GCC Gnu FSF

In article <2824@mit-hermes.AI.MIT.EDU> phr@hermes.UUCP (Paul Rubin) writes:
>
>I regret Marty's having felt abused by my article.  I was trying to be
>friendly and helpful, pointing out some difficulties he might
>encounter in doing his port, and expressing my bewilderment at his
>suggestion that "the best use of GCC is as a code generator for
>another compiler".  I haven't seen what Len Tower sent Marty, but I
>know Len and doubt very much if he said anything that he intended to
>be the least bit abusive.

In response to my flame, Paul Rubin writes an apparently conciliatory
note in which he does precisely what I took exception to.  A more
proper use of the editorial form would have been to quote ". . . the
best use of GCC is as a code generator for another compiler." which
would have made clear that the quote had been edited in such a way as
to remove context which modified its meaning.

To the audience to which I addressed my note -- the Atari ST user
community -- the word "compiler" implies producing a runable image
from a source program, which is the meaning I took from the first
request and was responding to.

I thank Paul for his constructive comments and condemn him
for his bad editorial habits. I find being misquoted to be very
distasteful; especially when my original comment was botched and needs
clarification anyway. (:-(

I am also leary of individuals who assume that the portion of the
community of experts that they belong to is "most".  To most of the
compiler writers (about 10) that I know, "compiler" means two
things, depending on the context.  When marketing a product, they
think of compiler in the way users do -- as a way to generate a
runnable binary from source code -- when working internally, they think
of "compiler" as that part which translates the source representation
into some format (possibly text assembly, possible binary load
modules) which is processed by the rest of the user's "compiler".

I try to keep these two usages clear by staying in context. I am glad
Paul has clarified his misunderstanding of my remarks. I am also glad
he expanded on what I should have said, rather than what I said.

Paul is correct.  What I had intended to say was that GCC, as it
currently exists will only act as a compiler in the technical sense,
not in the consumer sense; and that as such, it would require
obtaining an assembler, a loader, a librarian, and a set of libraries
to be useful.  His discussion of these things does a good job of
explaining the problems using GCC this way.

A further problem is that a thorough port to ST would involve
generating code for each of the most popular library formats, or
providing a translator for modules produced by the formats, as is done
by some of the commercial products.

It is my intent to use GCC on the ST (if I can get around all of these
obstacles) to generate code for an existing (as of yet unspecified)
commercial assembler and loader. I have access to a public domain
librarian and will probably use it.  I have not gotten far enough to
figure out what I'm going to do about the runtime environment;
although I will develop bindings to allow access to GEM.

However, if anyone can point me at the source (in C or PASCAL) for an
assembler, loader, and librarian, as well as any pieces of the ANSI
Draft runtime library I can use; I will use those.

Marty