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Comment by pulsarpietro | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic, I wish I were born those times.

The impact of the gnu manifesto was pretty big. We talked about it, wondered when he'd get a compiler better than the PCC. I think we (leeds uni, 1980s) said years off but actually gcc 0.9? Came out far faster than I expected.

Roll forward 10-15 years. Former compiler writers out of work. Gcc and llvm killed the market. On the other hand we have really good competing duopoly of compilers and lots of upper language support and diverse languages. So.. win some lose some. And it's not like rust and go and Java have to use llvm and gcc. Rust does. Go doesn't always.

Commercial compilers are still produced - IBM with its XL C compiler, for example, and Intel's icc. Both are good. Intel's icc often produces slightly faster code than GCC. And a little back in time, SGI's MIPSPro compilers were extremely good. I'm sure there are a couple more contemporary compilers out there but the IBM and Intel compilers are something we use at work, at least.

> Commercial compilers are still produced - IBM with its XL C compiler, for example, and Intel's icc. Both are good.

We have a few AIX machines and I’ve never heard anyone refer to xlC as a good compiler. It’s an aging compiler with idiosyncratic linker flags/behaviour and no support for modern standards.

I have no idea what you mean by 'no support for modern standards'. It's a modern compiler for modern C (and the newest versions are compatible with code written for modern gcc, with a flag). The only thing about it is it has its own syntax for flags, which aren't exactly difficult, and they're well documented.

It produces better code than gcc in many cases. Which is exactly what you would expect for a compiler written specifically for IBM by IBM. Lots of fine-tuning options for the Power architectures.

You say you have a few AIX machines - which one, and which OS version, and which compiler versions? I'm on Power7 and Power8, with AIX 7.1 Don't look at AIX 4/5.

Lets not forget that GCC was largely ignored until UNIX vendors, starting with Sun, decided to split UNIX into user and developer editions.

As for killing the market, there are still plenty of commercial compilers around, specially when one looks beyond the PC market.

Whitesmiths, pyramid and at least one other exited in the 1990s. I think what we're seeing is a more recent resurgence.

I were, unfortunately at 3 years old I wasn't interested in computers much, and I didn't have the means to get MIT papers (or any recent papers, or the knowledge that such papers exist for that matter) even when I developed interest in computers.

But, yeah, being born in right time and place would be wonderful.

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