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)