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From: phr@mit-hermes.AI.MIT.EDU (Paul Rubin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Forwarded message
Message-ID: <2773@mit-hermes.AI.MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 6-Jan-87 12:45:44 EST
Article-I.D.: mit-herm.2773
Posted: Tue Jan  6 12:45:44 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 6-Jan-87 22:56:36 EST
References: <8701022135.AA07189@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> <7472@utzoo.UUCP> <539@eneevax.UUCP> <10979@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: phr@hermes.UUCP (Paul Rubin)
Organization: MIT AI Lab, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 20

In article <10979@sun.uucp> cmcmanis@sun.uucp (Chuck McManis) writes:
>
>The biggest problem of porting MINIX would be porting the C compiler,
>since compiler design breaks down into two camps, the parser and the
>code generator. You would literally have to rewrite half of the compiler
>to port it. 
>
No, you'd have to rewrite the whole compiler, since the compiler sources
don't come with MINIX.  You can get them but you have to pay big $$$.
(Anything good enough for Tanenbaum to charge lots of money for, you don't
get for $79.95).

The GNU C compiler will be released soon and it generates better
68000 code than any commercial compiler we've compared it with.
Maybe someone can make it work on an Atari.

(Note: actually, parsing and generating machine code are each much
less than 1/2 of a compiler.  Between them, there are a lot of
machine-invariant translation and optimization phases before
instructions actually get written out.)