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Amsterdam Compiler Kit

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Re: Amsterdam Compiler Kit

#61

Post by justin66 »

jacquesm wrote: post #43
rogerbinns wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was one of those students saving up the large sum for the book, when Linux was announced. There were other tensions at the time - the biggest was that Minix on 8086 was 16 bit real mode only. Someone had developed patches to run in 32 bit protected mode, but they were invasive and large, and the Minix maintainers would not integrate them as the increased complexity would not help the mission of Minix being easy to…

Tanenbaum made that deal. He collected royalties from the book (as was his right) but it clearly was a way to make money for him. Just another part of the textbook grift because students were forced to work on Minix long after that that made any sense at all. Ironically, that single threaded nature of the FS made it a perfect match for my own little OS and I happily hacked it to pieces to bootstrap it using message p…

> students were forced to work on Minix long after that that made any sense at all

Not to defend the textbook grift or the lack of vision here, but I strongly suspect an undergraduate minix course taught at VU would be very good. It’s not obvious to me that it would be inferior to the xv6-based course taught at MIT, for example.

Re: Amsterdam Compiler Kit

#62

Post by phicoh »

JJMcJ wrote: post #60
phicoh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The librarated part means free from government control. Until the VU all Dutch universities belonged (indirectly) to the Dutch government.

Some universities, especially in Latin America, use the term "autonomous". Is that the same thing is "free" in this context?

Yes. Absence of direct control by the government. The VU was founded for religious reasons, so the main goal was to be able to teach theology according to the particular type of protestant Christianity that the founders of the VU believed in.

Re: Amsterdam Compiler Kit

#63

Post by lioeters »

DonHopkins wrote: post #48
ptx wrote: post #15

Is this the same compiler that famously spurred Richard Stallman to create GCC [1] when its author "responded derisively, stating that the university was free but the compiler was not"? It seems to be free now anyway, since 2005 according to the git history, under a 3-clause BSD license. [1] https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.en.html

UniPress, RMS's arch enemy Evil Software Hoarder, sold a commercial version of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit as well as Gosling's Emacs. https://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/92-04-041 UniPress made a PostScript back-end for ACK that they marketed with the NeWS version Emacs, whose slogan was "C for yourself: PostScript for NeWS!" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42838736 >UniPress ported and sold a commercial…

> cost $2,995 for binaries or $14,995 for sources

My goodness, this is hard to imagine from today when open source has driven the price of software (code itself) to nil. And that's the price from decades ago. While I'm glad I don't have to pay 15K for a C to PostScript compiler, as someone who might have written similar software if I'd lived back in those days - I can imagine an alternate timeline where I'd be getting paid to write such tools instead of doing it as a hobby project.

> NeScheme.txt

Nice rabbit hole about LispScript, what a cool idea. I've been re-studying Scheme recently, its history and variants like s7, and was appreciating its elegance and smallness as a language, how relevant it still is. One of the books I'm reading uses Scheme for algorithmic music composition. (Notes from the Metalevel: An Introduction to Computer Composition)

Re: Amsterdam Compiler Kit

#64

Post by jacquesm »

justin66 wrote: post #61
jacquesm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tanenbaum made that deal. He collected royalties from the book (as was his right) but it clearly was a way to make money for him. Just another part of the textbook grift because students were forced to work on Minix long after that that made any sense at all. Ironically, that single threaded nature of the FS made it a perfect match for my own little OS and I happily hacked it to pieces to bootstrap it using message p…

> students were forced to work on Minix long after that that made any sense at all Not to defend the textbook grift or the lack of vision here, but I strongly suspect an undergraduate minix course taught at VU would be very good. It’s not obvious to me that it would be inferior to the xv6-based course taught at MIT, for example.

That's fair, but it would be no less effective than a similar course based on Linux which would actually give the graduate a far more practical amount of knowledge. Acquisition of knowledge isn't free and to purposefully use a toy when the real thing is freely available for commercial reasons is just grift and AT and VU were well aware of this.

Note that all I'm doing here is taking AT at his word that he developed Minix solely because the source to Unix wasn't free to universities to hack on. They could have adopted Linux from the day that it became available then, or at least the beginning of the next academic year.

Re: Amsterdam Compiler Kit

#65

Post by jacquesm »

phicoh wrote: post #56
jacquesm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagreed strongly with that at the time and still do. The money we're talking about here was a pittance compared to the money already contributed by Dutch society to the university where these people were working. Besides that some of these royalty streams went into private pockets. A friend of mine was studying under Andy and I had a chat with him about this at his Amstelveen residence prior to the release. He wa…

Universities get paid for teaching and research. Any software that is produced is a by product. Producing production quality software in a university is not easy and the university has to find a way to fund it. MINIX was originally a private project of ast. It worked very well for the goal of teaching student the basics of operating systems. One thing that might have been a waste of time is making the MINIX utilities…

> The ones that wanted to work on Linux could just do that.

Sure, but time is a very finite quantity and wasting a couple of years on Tanenbaum's pet project may have resulted in some residual knowledge about how operating systems in general worked but looking at most of the developments they pursued the bulk were such dead-ends that even outside of VU there was relatively little adoption. The world had moved to Linux and VU refused to move with it.

From being ahead they ended up being behind.

Re: Amsterdam Compiler Kit

#66

Post by phicoh »

barfiure wrote: post #29
Rochus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The book version is a subset of Minix version 3.1.0 (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/Minix3/tree/3.1.0 ). The sursprise comes when you try to compile the minimal book version and find out that it is not as lean as presented in the book but actually depends on hundereds of assembler files (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/Minix3/tree/Minix3_Book_TCC ).

I’m a tad confused so maybe I’m not understanding the horror show. Tanenbaum explicitly mentions multiple times that the book is a subset of the code because it would be too long to print with the library. So he covers mostly the main areas. But the source code, in its entirety, is mounted under /usr/src. And it has all the assembly files in ACK files, mostly in lib I believe. You can compile it with a make command a…

Converting between ACK and GCC assembler is a solved problem. Minix-vmd can be compiled with both ACK and GCC.

Unfortunately, when MINIX3 as started, it was copied directly from MINIX2 and a lot of interesting stuff was left out.

Re: Amsterdam Compiler Kit

#67

Post by hbogert »

gjvc wrote: post #39
hbogert wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really just made an account now to make that point?

his comment was more useful than yours

He made an account name called vrijen which is having sex in dutch.. as he himself explained. Not sure if you noticed that part

Re: Amsterdam Compiler Kit

#68

Post by phicoh »

jacquesm wrote: post #65
phicoh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities get paid for teaching and research. Any software that is produced is a by product. Producing production quality software in a university is not easy and the university has to find a way to fund it. MINIX was originally a private project of ast. It worked very well for the goal of teaching student the basics of operating systems. One thing that might have been a waste of time is making the MINIX utilities…

> The ones that wanted to work on Linux could just do that. Sure, but time is a very finite quantity and wasting a couple of years on Tanenbaum's pet project may have resulted in some residual knowledge about how operating systems in general worked but looking at most of the developments they pursued the bulk were such dead-ends that even outside of VU there was relatively little adoption. The world had moved to Linu…

I wonder who you are thinking of who 'wasted a couple of years'. Regular students do one course in operating systems. That is a series of lectures and some practical work. The practical work is a couple of weeks at most if you know what you are doing.

Some people spent a lot more time on MINIX, but that was either as a hobby or the PhD students who worked on MINIX3. But MINIX3 generated lots of papers with a best paper award, so that can hardly be seen as wasted from an academic point of view.

Re: Amsterdam Compiler Kit

#69

Post by Rochus »

phicoh wrote: post #66
barfiure wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a tad confused so maybe I’m not understanding the horror show. Tanenbaum explicitly mentions multiple times that the book is a subset of the code because it would be too long to print with the library. So he covers mostly the main areas. But the source code, in its entirety, is mounted under /usr/src. And it has all the assembly files in ACK files, mostly in lib I believe. You can compile it with a make command a…

Converting between ACK and GCC assembler is a solved problem. Minix-vmd can be compiled with both ACK and GCC. Unfortunately, when MINIX3 as started, it was copied directly from MINIX2 and a lot of interesting stuff was left out.

> Converting between ACK and GCC assembler is a solved problem.

I assume you mean because the assembler was manually migrated in later Minix versions, not because there is a tool which can do so automatically. Or did I miss this?

> and a lot of interesting stuff was left out

Can you please make examples what you mean specifically?

Re: Amsterdam Compiler Kit

#70

Post by phicoh »

Rochus wrote: post #69
phicoh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Converting between ACK and GCC assembler is a solved problem. Minix-vmd can be compiled with both ACK and GCC. Unfortunately, when MINIX3 as started, it was copied directly from MINIX2 and a lot of interesting stuff was left out.

> Converting between ACK and GCC assembler is a solved problem. I assume you mean because the assembler was manually migrated in later Minix versions, not because there is a tool which can do so automatically. Or did I miss this? > and a lot of interesting stuff was left out Can you please make examples what you mean specifically?

Yes, there is a tool called asmconv, that converts.

One example is the new compiler driver that can use ACK and GCC from a single compiler driver and that can automatically convert assembler and figure out which archiver to use to create libraries.

Another example is library support for filenames longer than 14 characters that was completely transparent. MINIX3 just broken all backward compatibility by increasing the size of directory entries to a new fixed size.

I'm sure there is more stuff, these are just a few I remember.

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