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The Dinkumware Library

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I have been fortunate to have worked with (or at least in the same room with 🙂 ) some really smart people over the years: people that worked at the Space Shuttle compilers, people that designed the ground breaking 200Mhz DEC Alpha system, the HP PA-RISC team etc., but the one that left the most impression on me is P.J. Plauger. He found Whitesmiths in the mid-70s after working with the early Unix/C people at Bell Lab. Whitesmiths produced one of the earliest C compiler outside of the Bell Lab and he wrote Idris, a Unix V6 compatible OS from […]

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Parallax Propeller and the Propeller C Compiler

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I worked at compiler teams for a few companies before founding ImageCraft: large ones like DEC (RIP) and HP, but also smaller ones like Whitesmiths and Intermetrics. The joke is that when a company promotes their latest chips as “co-designed with C compiler experts,” it means that they’d sent us poor compiler writers an email after tape-out. In reality, C is a fairly easy language to support – the experience of the early C designers when they first wrote PDP-11 Unix in C, and then ported it to a different architecture (the Honeywell 635, a mainframe) helped hone C to

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REXIS (V2): The Subsumption Architecture OS

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Subsumption Architecture was defined by MIT’s Rodney Brooks as a new method of building intelligent systems based on reactive behavior based control. While 20+ years later, the promise of the subsumption architecture has not produced an intelligent robot yet (although I suppose we don’t *really* know the full capability of the PackBots used by the military 🙂 ), the subsumption architecture remains an enticing theory for building control systems. With the ever increasing use of embedded micrcontrollers and sensors, the subsumption architecture becomes an appealing choice for such system due to the following properties: The architecture is inherently multiple process

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Development Plan

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One of the clear demands from the comments to our prior posts is that we should concentrate on delivering great compilers. I thought I’d lay out our primary development plan for the next 6 months, in increasing order of priority: Expand Our Offerings – microcontroller dominance comes and goes. 8051, HC11, PIC16, AVR are some of the most popular 8 bits controllers in their times. To remain competitive, we need to monitor the next greatest hit. With 32 bits controllers coming down in prices and gaining in features, it’s natural that we move into that segment of the market, as

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Next-gen IDE followups

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Lots of great comments on the last post here and on our mailing lists. Let me elaborate on the subject: To address why working on the IDE at all when a simple one suffices: it is definitely the case that ImageCraft will continue to place the most emphasis on compilers. The thing to keep in mind is that the resources that can work on compiler backends are usually not the same as the ones that can work on GUI and IDE. Hence working on the next-gen IDE will not take away resources from the compiler development. (I will write another

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