A Potential Competitor for GCC: pcc

As pcc works towards 1.0, here's a review of the potential alternative for gcc in Linux programming...

"A C compiler with a long history in the BSD world has recently been imported into the package repositories of the major BSD variants. There are thoughts that it may, perhaps, replace GCC for BSD development some day. A competitor to GCC might be very well received in some parts of the Linux community, as well--grumbling about the compiler, its speed, and the code it generates have been heard for some time.

"The Portable C Compiler (pcc) came from Bell Labs in the 1970s and shipped with 4.3BSD-Reno. It was eventually replaced by GCC in 4.4BSD, but it is a much simpler compiler than GCC, while still targeting many architectures. More recently, most of the compiler has been rewritten by Anders Magnusson and others. It will currently compile many of the BSD userspace programs, even linking to libraries compiled with GCC. It is also available in RPM format for Fedora Core 6 and Fedora 7." [Read more]