> 
> "Chris G. Demetriou" writes:
> > > On Tue, 27 May 1997, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> > > 
> > > > I have seen the "bootstraps are harder" argument before, and I'm not
> > > > sure I buy it.
> > > > 
> > > > 1) If you are trying to port NetBSD to a platform there must
> > > > be some version of GCC that works on it.
> > > 
> > > Why `must' there be?
> > 
> > Certainly, initial development of some ports (e.g. NetBSD/alpha) was
> > done with the native (non-gcc) compiler...
> 
> Digital Unix will run GCC just fine, so this was obviously a conscious
> choice you made.

Actually, at the time, Digital UNIX (then OSF/1) didn't run gcc very
well at all.  (It could run, but there were ... a lot of bugs.)

If i had to wait until gcc worked well on the alpha (where "well" is
defined as "as well as the native compiler"), many would say that I'd
still be waiting.

At the time, for the initial bootstrap, there _was_ no real choice.


cgd