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Re: Drop the K&R requirement from binutils?
- From: John Reiser <jreiser at BitWagon dot com>
- To: binutils at sources dot redhat dot com
- Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2002 12:01:19 -0700
- Subject: Re: Drop the K&R requirement from binutils?
- Organization: -
> > GDB, for instance, gave up waiting three years ago.
> GDB is not needed to bootstrap a development environment.
Bootstrapping does not have to be done all in one step.
The use of a cross compiler is not forbidden.
The translator literature of 30 and 40 years ago
tells of compiler bootstraps taking large handfuls of steps,
often on 2 or 3 different machine architectures.
Just freeze some version of gcc and its necessary toolchain (say:
gcc 3.2 or 2.95.3, and binutils 2.1y) as the "K&R C bootstrap
phase". As long as those versions are available for distribution,
and the hardware+OS will run the executables they produce, then
a new version of _any_ tool in the chain can be written in C90.
--
John Reiser, jreiser@BitWagon.com