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by brynet 1342 days ago
The last attempt I'm aware of was over a decade ago now, at the time there was some interest in building the system (kernel+userland) with pcc (Portable C Compiler), ultimately LLVM/clang won out in the end.

https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20091228231142

1 comments

so mostly clang then gcc.

Totally unable to compile without such grotesquely and absurdely massive c++ coded compilers like linux.

sad.

Well, projects like the BSDs need a lot of platform support, where even LLVM is still lacking. You wouldn’t want a different compiler for each arch. There simply aren’t that many candidates.
eat the bullet: cleanup syscalls, write a full kernel using risc-v assembly with a conservative usage of the preprocessor. Get done with compilers for good... and only for that it would be even worth maintaining full assembly code for the few major ISAs and a generic C implementation which compiles with naive, small and simple C compilers and certainly not gcc or clang.

I know what to do now.