Compilers used to be something that nobody could afford to work on for free. Mostly because you had to start from scratch and move forward. I don't know if gcc started as an improvement in pcc or not but for its early years it was both functional and atrocious. Comparing its generated code to the Greenhills C compiler you just shook your head and wondered why would anyone ever advocate this stuff?
But the really magical thing about open source is that it never dies. And there is always someone willing to look at the code and fix a bug, or add a feature. And if you had a new architecture and no budget you could not afford the NRE charge of a big compiler company to build a code generator for you. And so it got incrementally better. Bit by bit. And the better it got, the more useful it was, and the more useful it was the more people used it, and then at some point it crossed the point where the economics of using a free compiler and dedicating some staff to fixing the problems you had made more sense than buying a compiler and waiting for the compiler company to fix bugs.
It really is a fascinating thing to consider and I expect that someone could write a very entertaining book about it at some point.
> It really is a fascinating thing to consider and I expect that someone could write a very entertaining book about it at some point.
Someone already did write that book, and that someone is RMS! If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend "Free Software, Free Society". And in the spirit of things, it of course available Freely: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf
(Though I do have a hardcopy which I'd never part with.)
But the really magical thing about open source is that it never dies. And there is always someone willing to look at the code and fix a bug, or add a feature. And if you had a new architecture and no budget you could not afford the NRE charge of a big compiler company to build a code generator for you. And so it got incrementally better. Bit by bit. And the better it got, the more useful it was, and the more useful it was the more people used it, and then at some point it crossed the point where the economics of using a free compiler and dedicating some staff to fixing the problems you had made more sense than buying a compiler and waiting for the compiler company to fix bugs.
It really is a fascinating thing to consider and I expect that someone could write a very entertaining book about it at some point.