swany@reed.UUCP (Steve Swanson) (03/22/85)
*** *** On February 24 I send out a query for advice on (non-Fortran) RT11 compilers. I've summarized the 14 responces, tabulating below. Positive Responces --- votes --- --- reasons --- Pascal 2 7 Excellent code, few bugs, good support. Whitesmith's C 5 Reasonable code, debugged. DECUS C 5 Good code, cheap, good system interface. ================== Negative Responces Pascal 2 0 Whitesmith's 4 Idiosyncratic. DECUS 1 Buggy. ================== Comments For those with any experience, Pascal 2 was easily the compiler of choice. Many of us, however, can't currently afford it ($3200). The 2 C compilers seem to be about equal. The code production seems quite close. The DECUS compiler has a better RT11 interface, but Whitesmith's system is far more portable. (There seem to be several versions of the DECUS compiler floating around. Early versions were very buggy, the newest one sounds quite solid.) Also rumored were Algol, Ratfor, and Forth, but no first-hand experience was offered. ================== End of summary ================== One idea which came up in a few of the responces was: why use RT11 in the first place? Several people mentioned giving up on RT11-based projects and moving over to UNIX. Others mentioned a large RT11 userbase. Perhaps the relative merits of various operating systems on smaller PDP-11 systems requires further discussion. steve decvax!tektronix!reed!swany P.S. Thanks to the respondants: Andrew wlcrjs Rand Dow sequent Alan mit-vax J Bradford Parker gcc-bill Marty Sasaki harvard Ed Darken duke Dorothy decwrl Dave Wright fluke Kevin Ramer uab_cs J. A. Movshon hipl Dave Mason utcsri John watcgl John Cornelius sdcsvax Jeff Richardson dciem