gillies@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu (04/16/88)
Today we see companies like Apple that give away the O/S for free, if
you buy their hardware. It is a nice feeling to buy a product,
knowing that O/S upgrades in the future will be free.
Perhaps in the future, we will see silicon vendors that give away
compiler(s) for free when you buy their CPU chips. For instance,
Intel might sell (for a trivial charge) 1Mbit ROMs with C or Ada or
Modula-II compilers, to enhance their 8096 product.
This would rapidly advance computer architecture and compiler
innovation. New RISC/parallel chips could be arbitrarily strange and
efficient, as long as they ran ANSI C/Ada/Modula-II very fast. The
whole competitive ballgame would change. Hardware designers would
seldom need to worry about assembly programmers.
The time from a chip introduction to a new product might be as little
as 2 months, since the vendor's compiler could be used to port
software immediately. The CPU market would become much more dynamic
and innovative.
Don Gillies {ihnp4!uiucdcs!gillies} U of Illinois
{gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu}