Re: WANTED: One good retargettable compiler back end

glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu>
11 Dec 2005 19:58:04 -0500

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WANTED: One good retargettable compiler back end lux@diesel-research.com (Kim Lux) (2005-12-08)
Re: WANTED: One good retargettable compiler back end ian@airs.com (Ian Lance Taylor) (2005-12-08)
Re: WANTED: One good retargettable compiler back end nkavv@skiathos.physics.auth.gr (Uncle Noah) (2005-12-08)
Re: WANTED: One good retargettable compiler back end gah@ugcs.caltech.edu (glen herrmannsfeldt) (2005-12-11)
Re: WANTED: One good retargettable compiler back end nr@eecs.harvard.edu (2005-12-29)
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From: glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 11 Dec 2005 19:58:04 -0500
Organization: Compilers Central
References: 05-12-016 05-12-023
Keywords: code, comment
Posted-Date: 11 Dec 2005 19:58:04 EST

Ian Lance Taylor wrote:


(snip regarding gcc)


> Actually the biggest difficulty I've seen is that the tests in the
> testsuite tend to assume large memory space, 8-bit memory access,
> 32-bit ints, etc., so you wind up having to look at the tests
> individually to see which ones will never work on your processor, and
> which ones indicate actual problems.


I know some people recently working on a port to IBM S/370 (that is,
not XA/370 or ESA/390) have had problems getting it to run native with
ONLY about 8M bytes available. As a cross compiler it is fine.


It does seem that writing a compiler to run on small memory machines
is a lost art.


-- glen
[GCC and other Gnu programs have always assumed that they have vast amounts
of address space available. The target of GCC may have a tiny memory, but
the host better not. On the other hand, the original PDP-11 Unix C
compiler ran in about 24K bytes, with two passes and generated pretty good
code. -John]


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