> If you came to me tomorrow and said "I want to build a language just like C but with non-contiguous stacks" I agree, I would use LLVM or GCC. But that's not what happened.
Except that is exactly what happened. Russ says: "segmented stacks; we had to build that, so it was going to be incompatible from day one."
That's the rationalization though. It wasn't about features that you can all but do in plain ANSI C being 'too hard'. We all know what really happened is that they were comfortable with their Plan 9 toolchain and made a demo using it... which is fine. Then they continued to develop their demo for 5 years instead of throwing it out and doing it right, and now they are stuck having to make excuses for why their compiler and assembler and linker and runtime and tools are sub-par.
Except that is exactly what happened. Russ says: "segmented stacks; we had to build that, so it was going to be incompatible from day one."
That's the rationalization though. It wasn't about features that you can all but do in plain ANSI C being 'too hard'. We all know what really happened is that they were comfortable with their Plan 9 toolchain and made a demo using it... which is fine. Then they continued to develop their demo for 5 years instead of throwing it out and doing it right, and now they are stuck having to make excuses for why their compiler and assembler and linker and runtime and tools are sub-par.