Re: Thompson's Plan 9 C compiler

svensson@imec.imec.be (Lars Svensson)
13 Aug 91 07:50:04 GMT

          From comp.compilers

Related articles
Re: Thompson's Plan 9 C compiler peter@ficc.ferranti.com (1991-08-12)
Re: Thompson's Plan 9 C compiler svensson@imec.imec.be (1991-08-13)
Re: Thompson's Plan 9 C compiler davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (1991-08-13)
Re: Thompson's Plan 9 C compiler pardo@cs.washington.edu (1991-08-13)
Re: Thompson's Plan 9 C compiler howard@research.att.com (1991-08-14)
Re: Thompson's Plan 9 C compiler kurt@tc.fluke.COM (1991-08-15)
giving away the store by Factors of Two mo@bellcore.com (1991-08-16)
Re: Thompson's Plan 9 C compiler oz@ursa.ccs.yorku.ca (1991-08-16)
[1 later articles]
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Newsgroups: comp.compilers
From: svensson@imec.imec.be (Lars Svensson)
In-Reply-To: peter@ficc.ferranti.com's message of 12 Aug 91 16:39:05 GMT
Keywords: C, design
Organization: IMEC vzw, Leuven, Belgium
References: 91-08-048
Date: 13 Aug 91 07:50:04 GMT

[From comp.arch -John]


In article <GW5DMC@xds13.ferranti.com> peter@ficc.ferranti.com (peter da silva) writes:
      The Thompson compiler is extremely hardware-independent and generates
      good 68020, MIPS, and Crisp code.


Note that the code generator proper is hand-written for each of these
architectures. To quote the paper: "There is a considerable amount of
talk in literature about automating this part of the compiler with a
hardware description. Since this code generator is so small (less than
500 lines of C) and easy, it hardly seems worth the effort." I guess
this is less than a gcc hardware description anyway.


      It also implements full ANSI standard C, not a subset.


Not correct. To quote the paper again: "The compiler implements ANSI C
with some restrictions and extensions." "Several of the poorer
features were left out."


This is just nit-picking. I also really liked the paper.


J
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