[Info-vax] The (now lost) future of Alpha.

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-08-01 19:16:30 +0000, invalid said:

> On 2018-08-01, Simon Clubley 
> <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
>> On 2018-07-31, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>> On 7/31/2018 4:21 PM, invalid wrote:
>>>> The problem is you don't have any knowledge of the environment you're 
>>>> lecturing about.
>>> 
>>> Compilers are not or at least do not need to be environment specific. 
>>> They are only source language and target ISA specific.
> 
> No, again that is an oversimplification.
> 
> Compilers are source language, ISA, and OS specific. And that is where 
> you keep shooting yourself in the ass arguing with me. I get it that 
> you understand source languages and the idea of ISAs. What you don't 
> realize is you don't know anything about the OS or the environment 
> you're arguing about.

Compilers have gotten a whole lot more portable in the last years, and 
a whole lot more flexible.

Sure, a specific build of a specific compiler can be specific to an 
architecture and an instruction set or it wouldn't execure, but even 
those cases can increasingly generate code for different ISAs and 
wholly different targets.

That's all entirely routine on one of the platforms I deal with, too.

And some of those targets aren't even instruction sets, they're 
programming languages. or they're bytecode engines such as wasm.

That same compiler tool chain is also part of the foundation of the 
OpenVMS port to x86-64.



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