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Mono's MCS Compiles Itself On Linux
thing12 writes "On Thursday Paolo Molaro announced that he had managed to build the MCS C# compiler using MCS. This is a big step forward for Mono, as it means that Mono is almost a self hosting environment."
On that mentality, Linux is being as bad as MS in re-ripping off an idea from Sun. If one car manufacturer releases a model with built-in GPS/sat-nav, and others follow, do we say they're ripping off an innovative idea? To compete in an industry you must either provide what your competitors do, or provide something better.
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There were some mid-80s articles in Dr. Dobbs or Micro Cornucopia or the like that used a subset of C. No floats, and IIRC no typedefs, no multidimensional arrays, etc. Overall you probably lost about half of the features in a standard C compiler.
The idea was to bootstrap a full compiler via this intermediate language. It was good enough for you to write your full compiler, but simple enough that you could implement it in assembler in half the time required for the full compiler. (Remember that when you're bootstrapping a system you need to write all of the standard libraries, not just the compiler itself.)
A few years later gcc became good enough that this was a moot point. If you're developing for a new architecture, use GCC to bootstrap a cross-compiler.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken