XPost: alt.folklore.computers
From: bowman@montana.com

On Tue, 6 Jan 2026 21:00:25 -0500, c186282 wrote:

>    Clearly the GCC collection is More Complicated than I thought.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth it was the GNU C Compiler. Then it
learned new tricks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_transfer_language

However Stallman was more interested in developing emacs so people who
wanted to move faster forked EGCS. Getting improvements ported to GCC was
painful given King Stallman's control. GCC was the prime example in
Raymond's 'The Cathedral & The Bazaar'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

Raymond and Stallman have been taking shots at each other ever since.
Anyway, Stallman gave up and the EGCS group took over GCC, which was an
improvement. There were a few speed bumps. In 2000 Red Hat released GCC
2.97, which wasn't an official release and didn't work. It couldn't
compile the kernel so Red Hat had a separate program for that. They also
released a homegrown Python implementation that broke scripts. That fiasco
is why I shunned RH for 25 years. Fedora is working well and seldom breaks
stuff.


>    But I'm still not sure I'll call them 'compilers'
>    in the older sense of the word. Some intermediate term is required.

That would be RTL. Microsoft's CIL is similar but depends on a runtime.
CLang//LLVM is another approach which overlaps GCC. fwiw I have both on
this box.

IRs have been used for a long, long time.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/2480741.2480743

Some light reading:

https://archive.org/details/principlesofcomp0000ahoa/mode/2up

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)