Presented by Richard Miller
The Plan 9 C compiler originated at Bell Labs alongside the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems. It was part of the initial development toolchain for Go (before that language became self-compiling), and is a useful stand alone tool for building embedded software. A new RISC-V version of the Plan 9 C compiler, assembler and linker, targeting RV32IM cores such as PicoRV32, was announced by the author at ORCONF in 2018. The toolchain has now been expanded with floating point, compressed, and 64-bit instruction capability.
Richard Miller is a consulting engineer working in the borderland between software and hardware, on operating systems, programming language implementation, and digital logic design. His first C programming project was in 1977, adapting Dennis Ritchie’s original 16-bit PDP-11 C compiler to generate code for the 32-bit Interdata 7/32.