Timeline for Were there cross-compiler online services for the public?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
25 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 28, 2023 at 12:28 | comment | added | Jeff Zeitlin | @davidbak - I suspect that MS C being a two-pass compiler was ultimately inherited from their earlier Pascal compiler, which was also a two-pass compiler. The first pass converted source code into an intermediate code format; the second pass converted the intermediate into Intel OBJ format, and then you had to run the linker to generate an EXE file. The second pass was identical for MS Pascal, MS FORTRAN, and MS C; I remember one hacker of my acquaintance who actually used only one "pass 2" executable for all three languages, saving himself a not-insignificant amount of disk spance. | |
| Feb 23, 2023 at 17:31 | comment | added | davidbak | @KevinMcKenzie - that comment isn't on topic for retrocomputing: it is still the case, on some projects ... Sigh. (Just kidding of course about the comment not being "on topic" - anything goes in comments until the moderators come around ...) | |
| Feb 23, 2023 at 17:29 | comment | added | Kevin McKenzie | I'll point you to xkcd.com/303; that was a real thing. Sometimes, often, you just had to wait. | |
| Feb 23, 2023 at 1:03 | answer | added | scruss | timeline score: 0 | |
| Feb 17, 2023 at 10:55 | vote | accept | Schezuk | ||
| Feb 17, 2023 at 1:50 | comment | added | davidbak | @Schezuk - oh, well, that was true. The Microsoft C compiler has a pass one and pass two - each on its own floppy. If you only had two drives one held a diskette with your files and the other you'd swap the compiler disks in and out .. and in and out .. and in and out .. and so on and so forth. That is one major reason why Turbo Pascal (and later Turbo C) were so damn popular! | |
| Feb 17, 2023 at 1:08 | comment | added | Schezuk | @RBarryYoung I heard that some compilers (not assemblers) just wouldn't fit in the memory or even one single floppy disk for Family Computers, and compiling a complex project on Personal Computers took about a hour if not hours. | |
| Feb 16, 2023 at 23:11 | comment | added | davidbak | @RBarryYoung - We've talked about Realia COBOL before on this site - duckduckgo search (in order to get comments) That was pretty successful in its target market. | |
| Feb 16, 2023 at 19:54 | comment | added | RBarryYoung | RE: "Back in the 70s and 80s personal computers weren't powerful enough to compile codes in high-level languages" Nope, not what happened. The real "problem" was that they were not considered appropriate targets for some languages (specifically COBOL). In fact though, compilers on PCs for virtually every other language (and yeah, there was probably even some COBOL compilers out there too). They just didn't sell very well. | |
| Feb 16, 2023 at 13:45 | comment | added | Alan B | Anyone that had a real need for this, which was probably mostly games developers, used something like Andy Glaister's PDS in-house. retro-hardware.com/2019/05/29/… | |
| S Feb 16, 2023 at 5:03 | history | suggested | Glorfindel | CC BY-SA 4.0 | grammar corrections |
| Feb 15, 2023 at 23:24 | comment | added | davidbak | question talks about "small simple compilers" vs "sophisticated ones generating optimized binaries". it should be pointed out that the "sophisticated ones" back then were not at all in the same ballpark as today's optimizing compilers - not even for mainframes or larger minis. "optimizing" technology was in its infancy. Common subexpression elimination, loop reduction/unrolling, stuff that today is totally basic. No link time code generation! No profile-guided optimizations! And those optimizations there were for generally for large numerical codes. Nothing you'd be doing on a micro. | |
| Feb 15, 2023 at 22:00 | answer | added | Davislor | timeline score: 3 | |
| Feb 15, 2023 at 20:21 | answer | added | chthon | timeline score: 6 | |
| Feb 15, 2023 at 19:55 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Feb 16, 2023 at 5:03 | |||||
| Feb 15, 2023 at 19:06 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Feb 15, 2023 at 17:02 | comment | added | supercat | @JeffZeitlin: Cross assemblers were the original means via which code was developed for the 6502. While it might have been possible to bootstrap a 6502 monitor using a PROM, a bunch of switches, and a pulse generator, and then use that to bootstrap an assembler, programs like the Microsoft BASIC interpreters used in 6502-based machines by Commodore and Apple were assembled on a minicomputer. | |
| Feb 15, 2023 at 16:28 | comment | added | Jeff Zeitlin | @NateEldredge - I'm not sure, even as late as the Apple II, how widespread dial-up services were, and I'm not convinced that "cross-compiling" was a Thing at that point - although I vaguely seem to remember that cross-assemblers weren't unknown (but not widespread). | |
| Feb 15, 2023 at 16:12 | comment | added | Nate Eldredge | @JeffZeitlin: I think there is a somewhat earlier time period where it could have made sense, e.g. mid- to late 70s. A hobbyist might only be able to afford a small microprocessor and a couple KB of ROM, enough to control their toaster or whatever but not enough for a development environment. Though on the other hand, if you only have a couple KB of ROM, it's probably not too much work to just write the code on paper and assemble to machine code by hand. | |
| Feb 15, 2023 at 16:08 | comment | added | Nate Eldredge | It's before my time, but I have the impression that with a reasonable amount of money and/or begging, one could get a dial-in shell account on some organization's minicomputer. You could then run your cross-assembler or cross-compiler or whatever you want. If they didn't already have it installed, you would ask the sysadmin politely to install it, or build it from source in your own account if you had enough disk quota. | |
| Feb 15, 2023 at 12:31 | answer | added | dave | timeline score: 26 | |
| Feb 15, 2023 at 12:15 | answer | added | Raffzahn | timeline score: 15 | |
| Feb 15, 2023 at 11:48 | comment | added | Jeff Zeitlin | I don't know that the premise of this question is truly valid; I remember several business systems written for the Commodore PET/CBM systems written in 6502 Assembler and CBM-BASIC; I also remember business systems written for the Apple II (pre-plus) in Apple Pascal/UCSD Pascal. Turbo Pascal was an early useful compiler for CP/M systems, and was also one of the early ports to the IBM-PC, and Microsoft had an assembler and compilers that ran on and for the PC for Pascal, FORTRAN, and COBOL, with C coming later. | |
| Feb 15, 2023 at 11:16 | history | edited | Schezuk | CC BY-SA 4.0 | edit |
| Feb 15, 2023 at 11:06 | history | asked | Schezuk | CC BY-SA 4.0 |