Subject: Re: Compiling NetBSD with another compiler.
To: Anders Magnusson <ragge@ludd.ltu.se>
From: Alistair Crooks <agc@pkgsrc.org>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 09/15/2007 10:54:47
On Fri, Sep 14, 2007 at 04:36:30PM +0200, Anders Magnusson wrote:
> Hm, I realized that there were more people interested in this compiler, 
> so I'll send
> a mail about it on these lists also.  I have setup a mailing list about 
> pcc, join it by:
> _echo "subscribe pcc-list" | Mail majordomo@ludd.ltu.se_
> or similar.  There is also an embryo to a web page about pcc; 
> http://www.ludd.ltu.se/~ragge/pcc/
> which contains some basic information.
> 
> I have (as some people may know) been hacking on pcc for fun for some 
> years.
> After having that project on the shelf for a year or so, I decided to 
> make the compiler
> at least compile the NetBSD source tree again.
> 
> It is not yet bug-free, but it can compile the i386 userspace.  The big 
> benefit of it
> (apart from that it's BSD licensed, for license geeks :-) is that it is 
> fast, 5-10 times
> faster than gcc, while still producing reasonable code.  The only 
> optimization added
> so far is a multiple-register-class graph-coloring register allocator, 
> which may be
> one of the best register allocators today.  Conversion to SSA format is 
> also implemented,
> but not yet the phi function.  Not too difficult though, after that 
> strength reduction is
> high on the list.

Thanks, ragge.

I've added this to pkgsrc/lang/pcc - all further contributions welcome.

FYI, there was great interest expressed in pcc by all of the BSD projects
here at EuroBSDcon 2007, since a BSD-licensed compiler is high on the
list of priorities for us.

Thanks once again for doing this - it's really, really neat.

Best,
Alistair