[simonh]

I can support the trust issue with C compilers. I did my CS degree in the 80s and every C compiler I used had severe bugs. These weren’t on Unix to be fair, they were to run on PCs or to program embedded systems, but they were awful. I remember one (Aztec C?) crashing out because one of my statements had two lines of whitespace before it instead of one (or maybe it was an extra space in a blank line? I forget), which was fine elsewhere in the program but just caused a problem in that particular context. I first used GCC in the 90s and it was heaven.

[mark-r]

In the '80s I used a cross-compiler that ran on DOS and produced code for 68K. We probably ran into a compiler bug monthly on average. We always got great turnaround on our bug reports though - I think it was a one-man shop.