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Old 8th November 2008
BSDfan666 BSDfan666 is offline
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Cool The PCC project seeks donations for ambitious 1.0 release.

So, Yesterday it seems Anders Magnusson put out a call for donations..

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=artic...20081108135831

PCC is already at an awesome stage, several developers have revived old targets... and it can already compile both OpenBSD's and NetBSD's userland and kernel.

If you have a few dimes to spare, perhaps you can help them work on the few remaining issues.

http://www.bsdfund.org/projects/pcc/
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Old 8th November 2008
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if only it was easy to get new (i know i can get old Mac) PPC for desktop use (with working graphics [2d/3d-optional])

I'd really love to try ppc.... (and yes, i know PS3 is ppc, but there ain't available (normal) video driver)
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Old 8th November 2008
adamk adamk is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by killasmurf86 View Post
if only it was easy to get new (i know i can get old Mac) PPC for desktop use (with working graphics [2d/3d-optional])

I'd really love to try ppc.... (and yes, i know PS3 is ppc, but there ain't available (normal) video driver)
Wow, did you follow the links? Or even read the first post? ppc, in this context, is not the powerpc CPU. It's a fully BSD licensed toolchain.

Adam
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Old 8th November 2008
BSDfan666 BSDfan666 is offline
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Woah, Did either of you read what I wrote? It's PCC(Portable C Compiler), not PPC.
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Old 8th November 2008
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All those weird acronyms are very confusing
GCC, PPC, PCC, BBC... aaaahhh
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Old 8th November 2008
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Red face

actually i did read, and followed the link.... for some reason i thought it's about PowerPC
and for 2nd link i thought it's part of signature (hmm, why, i thought like that....
idk.... must get a sleep, also english ain't my native..., so sometimes i get confused)

I feel like fool... lol


SORRY
*goes back to learn reading *

Last edited by graudeejs; 8th November 2008 at 10:43 PM.
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Old 8th November 2008
JMJ_coder JMJ_coder is offline
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I think its awesome that they what to develop the entire toolchain to be able to (hopefully) boot GNU from the base BSD.

I read some responses on Digg (I think) that was saying that PCC wasn't very capable of creating optimized code like GCC. Does anyone know anything of this? Has the PCC team come out with any sort of benchmark comparisons?
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Old 8th November 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JMJ_coder View Post
I think its awesome that they what to develop the entire toolchain to be able to (hopefully) boot GNU from the base BSD.

I read some responses on Digg (I think) that was saying that PCC wasn't very capable of creating optimized code like GCC. Does anyone know anything of this? Has the PCC team come out with any sort of benchmark comparisons?
Not yet as the optimization was not high on the priority list of the developers. However due to the simplicity of code it is easy to imagine that once completed the PCC compiler can be far more optimized than the GCC monster. In practical terms that means that the code compiled with PCC can be probably twice faster than the one compiled by GCC. It would be funny to see OpenBSD running faster than Linux despite heavy crypting and randomization or even better my PIII ThinkPAD running faster than my boss' DeLL under Windows XP with Intel Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of RAM.

The advantages of PCC are numerous. It is only C compiler unlike GNU
Frankenstein. It is extremely portable. I think that it took only 2 days to
port it to i386. It is clean and simple. Originally PCC was written in late seventies by Stephen C. Johnson who was a professional mathematician and the member of legendary Bell Labs as a main C compiler for ATT Unix on PDP 11(Legendary DEC machine). It is much faster than GCC. It takes
about one third of time for PCC to compile the same code as GCC.
You will be actually able to compile Firefox in half an hour.

As BSD666Fan already mentioned that PCC is only 5MB of code while GCC is about 250MB. I can not wait for my default OpenBSD installation to slim down from 550MB to less than 300MB. If the developers of Dillo2 make serious progress (add OpenSSL support and possibly idiotic Java Script Engine) the only monster that I would have to keep would be TeX. I really wish Donald Knuth have cleaned up Troff instead of cooding Damn Small Linux here is coming damn small OpenBSD:-)


Lately GCC started dropping support for non-Wintel architectures which did upset many old Unix guys who still want to run their Alphas, Vaxes, and other more exotic ROCK stable hardware.

This is the greatest news possibly since the release of 4.4 BSD lighte.

Last edited by Oko; 9th November 2008 at 12:57 AM.
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Old 9th November 2008
JMJ_coder JMJ_coder is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Oko View Post
Not yet as the optimization was not high on the priority list of the developers. However due to the simplicity of code it is easy to imagine that once completed the PCC compiler can be far more optimized than the GCC monster. In practical terms that means that the code compiled with PCC can be probably twice faster than the one compiled by GCC. It would be funny to see OpenBSD running faster than Linux despite heavy crypting and randomization or even better my PIII ThinkPAD running faster than my boss's DeLL under Windows XP with Intel Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of RAM.
Or how fast my new laptop will run with that kind of potential!!!



Quote:
Originally Posted by Oko View Post
The advantages of PCC are numerous. It is only C compiler unlike GNU
Frankenstein. It is extremely portable. I think that it took only 2 days to
port it to i386. It is clean and simple. Originally PCC was written in late seventies by Stephen C. Johnson who was a professional mathematician and the member of legendary Bell Labs as a main C compiler for ATT Unix on PDP 11(Legendary DEC machine). It is much faster than GCC.
For some reason I thought that it also did C++ compiling. I do think that if it is to be ultimately viable, it will probably eventually have to compile C++ code.



Quote:
Originally Posted by Oko View Post
It takes
about one third of time for PCC to compile the same code as GCC.
You will be actually able to compile Firefox in half an hour.
I'd like to see the benchmarks for compiling kernel and userland.



Quote:
Originally Posted by Oko View Post
As BSD666Fan already mentioned that PCC is only 5MB of code while GCC is about 250MB. I can not wait for my default OpenBSD installation to slim down from 550MB to less than 300MB. If the developers of Dillo2 make serious progress (add OpenSSL support and possibly idiotic Java Script Engine) the only monster that I would have to keep would be TeX. I really wish Donald Knuth have cleaned up Troff instead of cooding Damn Small Linux here is coming damn small OpenBSD:-)
Hmmm...you just gave me a possible idea for my Senior Project next year.
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Old 9th November 2008
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Thread split to The big TeX and (g)troff thread, please continue all Tex/(g)troff discussion there.
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Old 9th November 2008
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As far as I understand newer versions of Gcc have dropped support for some architectures/hardware platforms. That is the reason, why for example NetBSD is forced to use older Gcc versions for some CPUs, while they only can use the newest Gcc for the i386 and amd65 platforms.

Wile gcc has the name of being an open source project, it is actually run by a few companies, which, if they don't see any need to still support an older CPU, just drop support.

Fromhttp://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.0/changes.html
Quote:
Obsolete Systems

Support for a number of older systems has been declared obsolete in GCC 4.0. Unless there is activity to revive them, the next release of GCC will have their sources permanently removed.

All GCC ports for the following processor architectures have been declared obsolete:

* Intel i860
* Ubicom IP2022
* National Semiconductor NS32K
* Texas Instruments TMS320C[34]x

Also, those for some individual systems have been obsoleted:

* SPARC family
o SPARClite-based systems (sparclite-*-coff, sparclite-*-elf, sparc86x-*-elf)
o OpenBSD 32-bit (sparc-*-openbsd*)
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Old 10th November 2008
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Dealing with c++ ports is easy, just add to the port Makefile:

Code:
BUILD_DEPENDS= lang/gcc42
It's really that easy, there is no need to add c++ support to any of the BSD's base -- FreeBSD seems to have a few c++ files in the source tree, but only by 3rd party projects (Just three: groff, OpenSSL and wpa_supplicant), rewriting those files to C would be infinitesimally easier than writing a c++ compiler, not in the least because c++ is a horribly designed language that almost no single human being can fully understand without a decade of study and a humongous brain.
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Old 18th November 2008
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Mmmh, PCC seems to be under heavy development. Great to hear!

For now, sticking with LLVM as the alternative to GCC is best for me.

Thanks BSDFan666, keep us updated!
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Old 18th November 2008
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Quote:
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Thanks BSDFan666, keep us updated!
The details are rather lacking, but the following comment has me hoping..

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=artic...8135831&pid=47

At this time, the $3,940 has been donated.. out of the desired $12,000.. only thing I've go to say is spread the word, keep people donating.
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Old 10th November 2008
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Another interesting project:
The Amsterdam Compiler Kit

Quote:
The Amsterdam Compiler Kit is a venerable piece of software that dates back to the early 1980s. It was originally written by Andrew Tanenbaum and Ceriel Jacobs as a commercial product; for many years it was also used as Minix' native toolchain. After eventually failing as a commercial project, it was made open source under a BSD license in 2003 when it looked like it was going to be abandoned and the code lost.

The ACK contains compilers for ANSI C, K&R C, Pascal, Modula-2, Occam 1, and a primitive Basic. It contains code generators for a large number of architectures, mostly 8 and 16 bit machines; there are also a set of generic optimisation, linker and librarian tools. Each language comes with its own runtime, so if you're a C programmer you also get a libc. Compared to gcc, it is far smaller, faster and easier to port.
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Old 10th November 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker View Post
Another interesting project:
The Amsterdam Compiler Kit
There was a discussion on the PCC mailing list about that specific project, something design flaw was noted by both the current maintainer of it, and PCC.

http://marc.info/?t=119393748800005&r=1&w=2

That doesn't mean it can't be used in some way, it used to be the Minix compiler.

The following is also neat:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/ElfToolChain
http://code.google.com/p/aski-m/wiki/ElfUtils
http://nwbintools.sourceforge.net/
http://nwcc.sourceforge.net/
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Old 13th November 2008
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I was testing out pcc and trying to use it to compile my final project - and I ran into an issue with it. It isn't my project, pcc won't even compile a "hello, world" program. It gives the error:

/usr/include//sys/cdefs.h:254: error: "No function renaming possible"
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Old 13th November 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JMJ_coder View Post
I was testing out pcc and trying to use it to compile my final project - and I ran into an issue with it. It isn't my project, pcc won't even compile a "hello, world" program. It gives the error:

/usr/include//sys/cdefs.h:254: error: "No function renaming possible"
You have to provide us information about your system and setup if you want help.



My fist hunch without any information about your system is that pcc compiler can not find even C libraries as your system is probably set up to use gcc. Do not worry PCC does compile. Without it we would not have BSD.

Last edited by Oko; 13th November 2008 at 04:24 AM.
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Old 18th November 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Oko View Post
You have to provide us information about your system and setup if you want help.



My fist hunch without any information about your system is that pcc compiler can not find even C libraries as your system is probably set up to use gcc. Do not worry PCC does compile. Without it we would not have BSD.
I wasn't so much asking for help as pointing to a - huh, look at that. But, I'm running NetBSD 4.0.1 with kernel 5.99.01 and pcc-current (whatever that is in pkgsrc-2008Q3 - I can get exact version if you want). I went with current because apparently the makefile in the pcc source is still off (it won't properly compile - there's a PR already for that).

version: pcc 0.9.9 for i386--netbsdelf


I'm not going to worry too much about this now - my C/C++ programs this semester have to be compiled with gcc, so I was just taking pcc out for a little test drive. I'll be looking to get everything (that is everything, not just pcc) on my laptop working over Christmas break (about 80-90% there now).
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Last edited by JMJ_coder; 18th November 2008 at 12:47 AM.
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Old 13th November 2008
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Are you using the version of PCC in the tree? or from their official website?
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