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GNU developed the catalysts which others useGNU developed the catalysts which others usePosted Jun 3, 2011 8:20 UTC (Fri) by PO8 (guest, #41661)In reply to: GNU developed the catalysts which others use by coriordan Parent article: How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?
Just for the record, in 1991 Johnson PCC and dbx/adb were perfectly viable alternatives to GCC and GDB. Not nearly *as* good, mind you, but plenty good enough for the work that needed to be done. Technically, Johnson PCC was probably never "open source", but it was also tiny and simple, and would have been easy to replace with an open source equivalent. Somebody would have, too, if GCC hadn't been handed to them for free.
I was building commercial products using these tools as late as the late 1980s.
The big break for GCC actually came with the advent of C++. Up until GNU C++, the only available C++ implementation was AT&T's fairly horrific CFRONT preprocessor. Not sure I'm thanking the GNU folks for making this language viable, and at any rate it was never really used for fundamental infrastructure.
What did you think BSD used for tools before RMS helped them out, anyhow?
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GNU developed the catalysts which others use Posted Jun 5, 2011 10:59 UTC (Sun) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
Thanks PO8, that's very interesting. I'll look into this more sometime.
Other people's accounts seem less optimistic about the other compilers that existed at the time. (RMS, Michael Tiemann, and others whose names I forget or don't know) I'll review those statements more critically next time.
Maybe those tools happened to work ok for your usage, but weren't good enough for larger/different projects? GNU was written in C, so it doesn't seem like the C++ frontend could be what made GCC important.
> Somebody would have, too, if
In all fairness, compiler development is littered with corpses of statements like this :-)
I think the fact that the GNU project actually did it, is what makes GNU special.
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