On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 12:48 PM, Timothe Litt <[email protected]> wrote:
> I wrote a fair bit of BLISS at various stages of its evolution. My > recollection is: > > BLISS-10 & BLISS-11 came from Wulf & Co at CMU. BLISS-10 is self-hosted > Right - Wulf, Steve Hobbs et al, FWIW: I just had lunch with Steve a few minutes ago. > . > > BLISS-11 is an evolution of BLISS-10. There was a PDP10-hosted version of > BLISS-11. I don't think it was ported to VAX. > > BLISS-36,-16,-32,-32E,-64E, MIPS, INTEL, IA64, are DEC's common BLISS - > evolved (and greatly extended) from BLISS-11, but not (really) > source-compatible for non-trivial programs. "common" means that (with > carefully defined exceptions that can be conditionally compiled), the same > language is accepted by all, and it's possible to write portable programs. > Including common BLISS itself. RMS-10/20 is another non-trivial example - > same sources as VAX/RMS. There are a number of targets and host > environment combinations that are supported. > > BLISS-16 is hosted on both PDP-10 and VAX, producing PDP-11 object code. > I used both. I didn't encounter an Alpha-hosted version - but it should > have compiled & run there, so it probably existed. Or was VESTed. > > Most software written in BLISS-10 & -11 was converted to common BLISS. > > There was an attempt at self-hosting BLISS-16, but it failed - > technically, it ran, but there really wasn't enough address space to make > it usable. Cross-compiling wasn't popular (networks were crude), so > BLISS-16 was not as widely adopted. > This follows my recollection/understanding with the minor tweak of addition being BLISS-INTEL64 (not to be confused with IA64), which is what the VMS, Inc for using now for the new OVMS port to Intel*64 systems. I believe that is currently running on an Alpha and cross-compiling, but Neil Faiman (one of the authors) was not at the usual 'compiler group Friday lunch' today to ask. Last I knew it was not 100% self hosting, although I think Neil has also said he had the development running on his Mac. So he may be cross compiling from a Mac not OVMS/Alpha - which would all testing on his laptop. (I've sent him email to make sure and if I'm miss-informed I'll update). The other thing to add is there were at least two generations of the compilers within DEC that I knew about. Tim you may have know of a third when I was off doing other things. The last (current) is the 'Gem' compilers which was a rewrite to allow N font-ends, with Y back-ends. I thought 'Compatible BLISS' was done to create BLISS-36/16/32 (PDP-10, 11, Vax) from the original CMU base; but was only targeting BLISS. AFAIK, the original Compatible BLISS compiler was developed on the PDP-10 and eventually replaced the CMU code. Prism forced the rewrite of the back-ends and with it the later generation and TLG wanted to clean up its act with a single back-end/optimizer that was common for all the languages [hence the Gem project - I'd have to ask Rich Grove for the details]. IIRC, Vax was used as the base for that system, although it moved to Alpha by the mid/late 1990s. Clem ᐧ
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