gcc for Pyramid

[Carl S. Gutekunst]

In article <14644 at comp.vuw.ac.nz> jonathan at comp.vuw.ac.nz (Jonathan) writes:
>Is there any reason not to distribute what I have?

PERSONAL OPINION: It seems to me that if people can reverse-engineer the IBM
PC BIOS ROMs and sell them, you can certainly take your reverse engineered
gcc backend and give it away.

>  Just as as an aside, I don't understand what Pyramid regards as
>  proprietary about their architecture.

Back when I was a customer, I squawked about this to my salescritter. What
were they afraid of? Someone would trying to steal the design? Get real. It
turns out there was a legitimate reason, though: the documentation of the
instruction set is complete enough for people developing in-house, but far
from the sort of thing that you'd want to hand out to Joe Average customer.
Giving it out means support, which means training RTOC, training customers,
and fixing bugs that block a customer's work but don't interfere with ours.
There was also the opinion that the Pyramid, being a UNIX system, was not a
machine people were supposed to be programming in assembler. And if anyone
had suggested that a high-quality free C compiler would be floating around
in 1988, you would have been laughed out of the room.

Making the document "proprietary" and making the customer sign a non-disclo-
sure was, amongst other things, a way of ensuring you know who had a copy of
the silly thing.

It would be interesting *now* to see if customers can put enough pressure on
Pyramid to make the Architecture manual more available. Now that RISC-derived
and really RISC designs are commonplace.

<csg>