Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!rutgers!ucsd!ucbvax!hplabs!hpda!hpcuhb!hpqtdla!rana
From: rana@hpqtdla.HP.COM (Rana Raychoudhury)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: GNU c and c++ under MINIX
Message-ID: <1720001@hpqtdla.HP.COM>
Date: 15 Sep 88 12:40:22 GMT
References: <2358@alliant.Alliant.COM>
Organization: HP, Queensferry Telecomms (UK)
Lines: 36

> rosenkra@Alliant.COM (Bill Rosenkranz) /  5:28 pm  Sep 13, 1988 /
> 
> there has been a lot of discussion in the past regarding the huge cost of
> source for the minix c compiler. has gcc (the GNU c compiler) and possibly
> g++ (the GNU c++ compiler) been ported to minix? since it is essentially free,
> this sounds like a very attractive alternative to the existing situation.
> 
> if it has not been ported, can it be ported? gcc is available in a number
> of places (i know of UUCP access from osu-cis). gcc has already been ported
> to the atari ST (but it has more memory :^). it is BIG and this might be
> a problem on 640k systems.

> -bill

  From the GNU CC 'internals' document, page 41 "GNU CC and portability",
  
  "The main goal of GNU CC was to make a god, fast compiler for machines in
   the class that the GNU system aims to run on: 32-bit machines that address
   8-bit bytes and have several general registers........"
                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  "GNU CC does not contain machine dependent code, but it does contain code
   that depends on machine parameters such as endianness (whether ths most
   significant byte has the highest or lowest address of the bytes in a word)
   and the availability of autoincrement addressing......"
                           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  Now, porting gcc to *minix* may not be a problem per se, but running gcc
  on machines without certain features (above) will be. From the text above,
  it would appear that porting gcc to Intel 80X8X architectures MAY be difficult.

  I would certainly be interested if anybody has done a successful port to
  (for instance) the Intel 80186/80188.

Rana Raychoudhury,
Hewlett-Packard QTD.

rana@hpqtdla