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That's not exactly true. Most Unix's came with a compiler, particularly in the early days preceding the first release of GCC. I think Sun was one of the first p

by cbsmith 15y ago

That's not exactly true. Most Unix's came with a compiler, particularly in the early days preceding the first release of GCC. I think Sun was one of the first proprietary vendors to start shipping a compiler separately, and I can't remember if GCC was already around when that happened, but it was at most an emerging trend when the GCC project started. I seem to recall that part of the impetus (along with the increased adoption of C for programming embedded systems) to switch to the more retargetable GCC 2.x architecture was the emergence of the "don't include the compiler" trend that made interest in having GCC for more platforms and languages, but perhaps my memory is fuzzy.

pjmlp 15y ago
The trend started shortly after AT&T changed the license to a more commercial license. It also overlaps with the time that AT&T tried to sue the Berkeley university. If I recall correctly, for HP-UX, Aix, Irix and Solaris, the vendor compilers have always been extra. And in other OS at the time, the don't include the compiler, was the trend, if I am not mistaken.
- cbsmith 15y ago
  Perhaps my memory is not as good as I once thought it was. I had thought C compilers were shipped or provided gratis on most platforms until a short time before Solaris. I could swear AIX did ship a compiler for a while, as I recall a time when I struggled to compile Emacs & GCC with AIX's compiler. Indeed, I remember even Windows NT had its compiler available for free (not Visual C++, just the NT compiler). I remember OS/2 didn't, and that earned it much scorn. I also have memories of GCC being ported to most platforms (and originally, it didn't really run on that many platforms) before the compilers stopped being available. Anyway, I really can't confidently stand behind those memories the more I think about it. The one thing I do remember was that when Sun stopped giving away their compiler, it was a big deal, and not helped by the fact that GCC struggled to match it's optimizer.

by cbsmith 15y ago

pjmlp 15y ago

The trend started shortly after AT&T changed the license to a more commercial license. It also overlaps with the time that AT&T tried to sue the Berkeley university. If I recall correctly, for HP-UX, Aix, Irix and Solaris, the vendor compilers have always been extra. And in other OS at the time, the don't include the compiler, was the trend, if I am not mistaken.

cbsmith 15y ago
Perhaps my memory is not as good as I once thought it was. I had thought C compilers were shipped or provided gratis on most platforms until a short time before Solaris. I could swear AIX did ship a compiler for a while, as I recall a time when I struggled to compile Emacs & GCC with AIX's compiler. Indeed, I remember even Windows NT had its compiler available for free (not Visual C++, just the NT compiler). I remember OS/2 didn't, and that earned it much scorn. I also have memories of GCC being ported to most platforms (and originally, it didn't really run on that many platforms) before the compilers stopped being available. Anyway, I really can't confidently stand behind those memories the more I think about it. The one thing I do remember was that when Sun stopped giving away their compiler, it was a big deal, and not helped by the fact that GCC struggled to match it's optimizer.