Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust [LWN.net]

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 10, 2021 20:02 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust by Hobart
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

You miss the fact that NeXT could have just contracted the compiler to one of the many proprietary C compiler writers. They have mostly died out now, but back in 90-s it was an easy option.

Yet they decided to just open the source and keep gcc, because it wasn't really a big deal for them.

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Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 13, 2021 22:13 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

This was not the 90s. This was the late 80s. There was very little in the way of an alternative base for a compiler around at the time.

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 13, 2021 22:29 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

At least half-dozen compilers existed back then: Aztec C, Lattice C, Megamax C, and others. Year 1983 article name Nine C Compilers for the IBM PC speaks for itself (and note that back then GCC had no support for x86 which means there were more compilers than these nine).

If Jobs really wanted to avoid publishing Objective C changes he could have easily done that. But apparently for him it wasn't a big deal. This changed with GPLv3: suddenly the deal was altered enough that it have become a big deal for Apple.