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From: jgk@panix.com (Joe keane)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: Re: GCC is 25 years old today
Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2012 01:05:03 +0000 (UTC)
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Keywords: GCC, history, comment
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In article <12-03-062@comp.compilers>,
[moderator] wrote:
>[I think it's fair to say that GCC was the first free compiler that
>generated code competitive with commercial compilers. -John]

I think i could make a fair argument for PCC.

And with Unix they say: of course; the compiler is part of the operating
system; who in the hell would not do that?
[Having looked at PCC in considerable detail, I can say that it generated
adequate code for a PDP-11, lousy code for a Vax or anything else with a
lot of registers.  It treated the registers as a stack, and the only
way a value got saved in a register was either an explicit register
declaration, or some very simple peephole optimizations. -John]