Amsterdam Compiler Kit on 6502?

[Steve Mynott]

I notice the Amsterdam Compiler Kit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Compiler_Kit has a 6502 backend.

 

Has anyone tried it as a cross compiler on A8?

Edited July 31, 2019 by Steve Mynott

[ivop]

Yes, I have. ACK targets a Virtual Machine that's implemented for each target. The VM is not interpreted though, but eventually each VM opcode is emitted as several target machine opcodes. But the resulting code is still slower than CC65 or gcc-6502. And bigger, too. Remember, this is from the mid-eighties. The MOS6500 backend at least.

 

Later, ACK was updated for 32-bit backends and ANSI C and used to be the default compiler of Minix. Even version 3! Although later they switched to clang and one of the *BSD libc's.

 

Edit: quick look at my books and docs and I found this:

 

 

Must be at least 24 years ago I printed this

 

Edited July 31, 2019 by ivop

[sanny]

Could you create scans of these?

[ivop]

18 hours ago, sanny said:

Could you create scans of these?

That's not necessary. Here are all the old white papers, including the two above:

 

http://tack.sourceforge.net/olddocs.html

[JamesD]

Seems to me, even the original author said this was pretty primitive. 

[ivop]

Yes, the 650x backend is primitive. But the whole compiler architecture and toolchain is very mature, fast, and has proven its worth up until Minix 3.