> On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 03:07:11PM -0500, Robertdkeys@aol.com wrote:
> 
>  > Does anyone know if there is a runnable pcc from Reno or
>  > somesuch that could be used as an alternative on NetBSD
>  > VAX?  After all, it is BSD, and should be BSD licensed.
>  > I would be very much interested in testing it against gcc
>  > on ports of various kinds.
> 
> IIRC, pcc was not BSD licensed, it was AT&T code.  Besides, pcc is
> not capable of compiling NetBSD.
> 
Well, pcc exist under a BSD license now since Caldera released it.

The second statement is very true, but it was not difficult to fix.
I have done a bunch of hacking on pcc to be able to compile the kernel,
so that I can continue with the PDP10 port. GCC needs lots of changes to
be useable for this task and I don't even closely understand how to fix it.
Writing a pcc port to PDP10 was done quite quickly.

The main "problem" with pcc is that it don't optimize anything, so
the resulting code is both large and slow. Pcc-compiled code is about
50% larger than gcc-compiled code.  This is also one of the reasons why
it is faster than gcc; it don't do any optimizations on trees.

If gcc is used without any -O flag it ends up much quicker but the
result is close to the pcc result in slowliness.

-- Ragge