Re: Future of ELKS

Gábor Lénárt
2004-05-21T08:32:48Z

Re,

On Thu, May 20, 2004 at 07:30:11PM +0200, Javier Sedano wrote:
> >I guess that running gcc on 8086 will not be possible (or at least it will
> >not be a simple task), the cc1 binary on my i386 is 2MB, and it will not
> >be smaller if built for running on 8086. gcc is not a small compiler. The
> >point is making a 8086 target for gcc. Running gcc on 8086 is another
> >story,
> >and I guess that is almost impossible. (and not worth, at least for me)
> >
>
> I supposed so. gcc is bloatware for elks. Even "vi" is :-PPP

Just visist www.cc65.org.

It's a C compiler (OK, it does not support all of the ANSI C though) for
6502 CPU family like 6510 used in Commodore 64. And there IS a full
GUI/Internet (!) enabled Operating System for C64 which is written in C, and
cc65 was used as C compiler for this project. This OS is named Contiki, and
it DOES support TCP/IP and others on an UNEXPANDED Commodore 64 (yeah, 64K
RAM and 8bit CPU running @ ~1MHz). Just visist:
http://www.dunkels.com/adam/contiki/ Contiki was ported to other systems as
well, even x86.

Ok, sure, cc65 can not compile itself, but 6502 CPU is a very limited
one compared even to 8086, the stack space is only 256 bytes, for example.
[so cc65 is a cross compiler]

Sorry, if this news is OT here though :)

The only meaning of my mail is the fact that 8086 if far much powerfull CPU
than 6502, so it SHOULD BE possible to write a good C compiler for it
which can even compile itself :) Though of course it should not be an
amazing fact, since some (...hmm...) years ago, 8086 was new and fresh ;-)

And again: sorry for the OT here ...

- Gábor (larta'H)
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