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GCC Compiler Finally Supplanted by PCC?
Sunnz writes "The leaner, lighter, faster, and most importantly, BSD Licensed, Compiler PCC has been imported into OpenBSD's CVS and NetBSD's pkgsrc. The compiler is based on the original Portable C Compiler by S. C. Johnson, written in the late 70's. Even though much of the compiler has been rewritten, some of the basics still remain. It is currently not bug-free, but it compiles on x86 platform, and work is being done on it to take on GCC's job."
OK, so it compiles C on x86. What do I use when I want to compile objective C on my microwave?
Someone relicense it under the GPL!
call me when pcc does something useful, like, say, working.
And he continues to write code in C...why?
Think about it. Getting a new compiler into free UNIX and the open source community is going to be as hard as getting a new platform on the desktop to compete with Windows. And for similar reasons.
You're not going to supplant GCC until you get all the code that depends on GCC-specific features modified to be standard portable C. That's a barrier to entry as steep as Microsoft's application barrier to entry. Now it's not as bad as it was in the early '90s when GCC was sprouting new C extensions everywhere (like the ability to have declarations not at the start of blocks, or the ability to leave the second element out of the trinary conditional operator, or things like alloca), and a lot of those features have now become common and even standardized (and others, like the shortcut trinary, have been deprecated). But it's not as easy as just having a good compiler, or even a good language translating ecosystem like Tendra... the playing field is anything but level.