Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!warwick!cudcv
From: cudcv@warwick.ac.uk (Rob McMahon)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: GNU c and c++ under MINIX
Message-ID: <54@titania.warwick.ac.uk>
Date: 27 Sep 88 14:47:58 GMT
References: <2358@alliant.Alliant.COM> <1720001@hpqtdla.HP.COM>
Reply-To: cudcv@warwick.ac.uk (Rob McMahon)
Organization: Computing Services, Warwick University, UK
Lines: 43

In article <1720001@hpqtdla.HP.COM> rana@hpqtdla.HP.COM (Rana Raychoudhury) writes:
>  "The main goal of GNU CC was to make a god, fast compiler for machines in
>   the class that the GNU system aims to run on: 32-bit machines that address
>   8-bit bytes and have several general registers........"
>                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Whilst GCC would like to use several registers, and much of its optimization
effort goes into allocating registers well, this doesn't mean it wouldn't work
on a machine with fewer registers.

>  "GNU CC does not contain machine dependent code, but it does contain code
>   that depends on machine parameters such as endianness (whether ths most
>   significant byte has the highest or lowest address of the bytes in a word)
>   and the availability of autoincrement addressing......"
>                           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The code that depends on such features is all #ifdef'ed, it doesn't *require*
such features, it just uses them if they're available.  There are certainly
machines without auto-increment that run GCC (I'm on one now), and it runs on
machines of both types of endianness.

>  Now, porting gcc to *minix* may not be a problem per se, but running gcc on
>  machines without certain features (above) will be. From the text above, it
>  would appear that porting gcc to Intel 80X8X architectures MAY be
>  difficult.

The problems you cite are not the real problems, I should think the problem is
going to be:

cudcv (53) %> size /usr/local/lib/gnu/gcc/cc1
text    data    bss     dec     hex
417792  40960   21744   480496  754f0	Sun-3
581632  16384   18752   616768  96940	SPARC
655360  49152   13920   718432  af660	Gould
cudcv (54) %> 

(cc1 is the compiler pass, this is on a Sun-3)

Rob
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Rob McMahon, Computing Services, Warwick University, Coventry CV4 7AL, England