[OT] Non-GCC compilers used for linux userspace

[Nix]

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Rob Landley whispered secretively:
> Actually according to the changelog version 0.9.21 grew support for ARM, and I 
> believe it supports some other platforms too.

That's... impressive. Of course the more generality it grows the slower
it must necessarily become, although it'll be a while until its IR is as
bloated and thus as slow as GCC's... (GCC's only slow because of cache
effects, really).

> The result was qemu, which sort of compiles machine code to machine code 
> dynamically, and which has taken up a large chunk of his time ever since.  
> (The speed of tcc development has tailed off noticeably since, but he still 
> spends a little time on it, and there are other developers...)

Well, I'd rather he spent time on qemu than tcc; there are other C compilers
but there's nothing quite like qemu (bochs doesn't work very well, valgrind
is similar in essence but very different in operation...)

>> > That aims for full c99 and is already implementing a lot of gcc stuff
>> > too.
>>
>> Good for it, as long as it doesn't go on to define __GNUC__ like icc did
>> at one point (even though it doesn't implement all GCC
>> extensions)... but Fabrice is sane so I doubt he'd do anything that
>> loopy.
> 
> That's more a header issue anyway.  That's the uClibc developers problem. :)

;)

-- 
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