GNU Compiler Collection - History

History

In an effort to bootstrap the GNU Operating System, Richard Stallman asked Andrew S. Tanenbaum, the author of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit (also known as the Free University Compiler Kit) if he could use that software for GNU. When Tanenbaum told him that while the University was free, the compiler was not, Stallman decided to write his own. Richard Stallman's initial plan was to rewrite an existing compiler from Lawrence Livermore Lab from Pastel to C with some help from Len Tower and others. Stallman wrote a new C front end for the Livermore compiler but then realized that it required megabytes of stack space, an impossibility on a 68000 Unix system with only 64K, and concluded he would have to write a new compiler from scratch. None of the Pastel compiler code ended up in GCC, though Stallman did use the C front end he had written.

GCC was first released March 22, 1987, available by ftp from MIT. Stallman was listed as the author but cited others for their contributions, including Jack Davidson and Christopher Fraser for the idea of using RTL as an intermediate language, Paul Rubin for writing most of the preprocessor and Leonard Tower for "parts of the parser, RTL generator, RTL definitions, and of the Vax machine description."

By 1991, GCC 1.x had reached a point of stability, but architectural limitations prevented many desired improvements, so the FSF started work on GCC 2.x.

As GCC was licensed under the GPL, programmers wanting to work in other directions—particularly those writing interfaces for languages other than C—were free to develop their own fork of the compiler (provided they meet the GPL's terms, including its requirements to distribute source code). Multiple forks proved inefficient and unwieldy, however, and the difficulty in getting work accepted by the official GCC project was greatly frustrating for many. The FSF kept such close control on what was added to the official version of GCC 2.x that GCC was used as one example of the "cathedral" development model in Eric S. Raymond's essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

With the release of 4.4BSD in 1994, GCC became the default compiler for most BSD systems.