[Coco] Compiler [was: CoCo Video Player]

[John Kent]

Hi John,

I've downloaded bcc09 and will take a look at it. Boisy has written a C 
compiler for the 6809 also which I've also downloaded, but I have to set 
up a development environment to compile it. I haven't looked at the 
source code, but I think it might have been written in Java.

OK on the output of bcc09 being similar to the old Introl compiler. I'm 
not sure who I was talking to, whether it was Rich Pennington from 
Introl, or John Hartman from NoICE, but I think the Introl compiler 
included line numbers of the source code that could be used to index the 
source or listing file.

I don't currently have a PC with Linux installed on it, but I do have 
Mingw and Cygwin. I did install Wubi on this PC, but I have fogotten the 
password and can't log in. I'll have to uninstall and reinstall it.

I also had VMware running CentOS on this PC so I could run the Linux 
version of the Xilinx ISE software. I tried to uninstall VMware but it 
didn't uninstall properly.

I used to run Linux years ago back in the days of dial up modems and 
Yidrasil (sp?). I had Red Hat 6.2 running on an old machine at one stage 
with IRLP software on it that doubled as a firewall router with 10base T 
coax running around the house :-)

I was looking at Vbcc a while back and that had peek hole optimization 
using string matching and substitution on the assembler output.

Generating a run time library for the compiler might not be too hard. 
I'm not sure what the issue is with OS-9. The SuperSleuth disassembler 
for the 6809 gave you a switch for disassembling code into position 
independent format. It would not matter if you used position independent 
code for FLEX, just provided the library had hooks into the operating 
system. I would have thought OS-9 would have provided similar I/O 
interfaces to Flex.

Thanks for your reply. I'll take a look at the code when I have done my 
other chores.

John

On 22/03/2011 7:04 AM, John W. Linville wrote:
> A while back, I was looking at retargeting the Bruce Evans C compiler
> (bcc) to target the coco.  I figured I'd start with RSDOS (or
> possibly FLEX) targets, since those have less specific code generation
> requirements than OS-9.  But, I hoped to support (Nitr)OS-9 as well.
>
> For those not familiar with it, the Bruce Evans compiler goes way back.
> It was (or is?) used to build Linux-oriented boot loaders like LILO
> and GRUB, and before that it was used in the Minix world.  But what
> makes it interesting is that it can also be built as a 6809 compiler.
> At its heart it's a K&R compiler, but it does have an "ANSI" mode
> that AFAICT is mostly just a function prototype convertor.  There is
> also a peephole optimizer as part of the codebase, but alas there
> are no optimization rules for 6809 included.
>
> The object file format actually is the same as the old Introl compiler,
> a commercial offering that targetted FLEX and probably some embedded
> systems and the like.  So theorhetically those libraries could be used
> with the compiler -- not a big motivator, but worth knowing. :-)  I did
> manage to find documentation for the Introl object format and convinced
> myself that the format matched what the toolchain was producing.
>
> When I was experimenting with it, it seemed to be generating reasonable
> code.  FWIW, I believe Chet Simpson had previously (years ago) said on
> this list that he had used bcc for some coco work and that he was
> pleased with its code generation.  Chet also claimed to have done
> some enhancements to bcc.  I managed to find the sources he published,
> but IIRC any changes from the original sources were minimal.
>
> So anyway, I decided that there wasn't much point in keeping the
> 80x86 code generation in the codebase -- let the x86 bootloader
> and ELKS folks worry about that! :-)  So, I set-out to strip all
> the non-6809-relevant bits from the code base.  I also made a few
> changes to the defaults (like setting the "ANSI" mode by default),
> and I applied a few bug fixes (mostly related to building/running
> on x86_64).  I called the project 'bcc09' and put the results here:
>
> 	http://git.infradead.org/users/linville/bcc09.git
>
> In my work, I'm really only concerned with Linux.  With that said,
> I have no motivation to prevent running on other Unix-like OSes
> (including OSX) or even Windows.  I would just need someone else to
> be interested enough to try that and to send patches to fix whatever
> is broken.  If you are interested, then let me know!
>
> John

-- 
http://www.johnkent.com.au
http://members.optusnet.com.au/jekent