ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) (03/01/90)
Let me add my two cents worth to the compiler discussion. We now have the ANSI compiler running on MINIX, along with the separate assembler and loader. Floating point is not finished yet, and the libraries need some work, but most of the system has at least compiled. As I have mentioned many times before, the compiler belongs to the university, so I can't give it away. The income we get selling it is used to support travel for graduate students to conferences and other activities, such as hiring the person who ported the ANSI front end to MINIX. Surely a worthwhile activity. When the compiler is finished (months, not years), it will be sold by UniPress and Transmediair. We haven't worked out the details yet (like, price, availability date etc), so PLEASE DO NOT ASK THEM. MINIX 1.5 will use the old 1.3 (actually 1.2) compiler, but 2.0 will use the new one. The compatibility problems will no doubt be immense, but let's not start on that yet. Rest assured that when the compiler is available I will post a notice to the newsgroup. One of the nicest things about the new compiler is the separate assembler and linker, so we can go back to normal .o files. I have been unable to compile kermit, elle, and elvis with the old compiler, as asld runs out of memory. I compiled elvis with the new one, and it seems to work. At least the one command I tried worked (the :q command). As far as I can tell, nobody has succeeded in compiling elvis on a PC. (With the ACK compiler). If I am wrong, please let me know immediately how you did it. As proof that I am not making this all up, In the next two messages I will post a uue'd binary of elvis for the pc. The binary file is 77K, so the uue'd version, which is over 100K, is too big for one message. After running uue, I split the elvis.uue file into xaa and xab, and then shar'ed both parts. It is these items that I will post. When you get them, first unshar them, then cat them together to get elvis.uue. Then uud this to get the binary. I would greatly appreciate it if people could try it and post their findings to the net. I would normally send it to the minix-ref group first, but I am leaving for the U.S. in a week, and I absolutely must get the 1.5 distribution finished before I go. Thus: please test fast. As an aside, 1.5.4 is now in beta test, and I have even more fixes beyond that. However, they are increasingly picayune fixes--things like #endif FOOBAR ==> #endif /* FOOBAR */ to make them ANSI-legal. Below are all the relevant crcs for elvis. Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl) 28494 77604 elvis executable binary 61543 108742 elvis.uue uue'd executable binary 32032 56636 xaa first part of split -900 elvis.uue 24732 52206 xab second part of split -900 elvis.uuevis.uue 50431 57479 elvis.1 shar'ed xaa 24889 53080 elvis.2 shar'ed xab