Amsterdam Compiler Kit
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Amsterdam Compiler Kit
The Amsterdam Compiler Kit (ACK) is a retargetable compiler suite and toolchain written by Andrew Tanenbaum and Ceriel Jacobs, since 2005 maintained by David Given. It has frontends for the following programming languages: C, Pascal, Modula-2, Occam, and BASIC. History The ACK's notability stems from the fact that in the early 1980s it was one of the first portable compilation systems designed to support multiple source languages and target platforms. The ACK was known as MINIX's native compiler toolchain until the MINIX userland was largely replaced by that of NetBSD (MINIX 3.2.0) and Clang was adopted as the system compiler. It was originally closed-source software (that allowed binaries to be distributed for MINIX as a special case), but in April 2003 it was released under the BSD licenses. Working principle Maximum portability is achieved by using an intermediate language using bytecode, called EM. Each language front-end produces EM object files, which are then proce ...
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Andrew Tanenbaum
Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum (born March 16, 1944), sometimes referred to by the handle ast, is an American-Dutch computer scientist and professor emeritus of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is the author of MINIX, a free Unix-like operating system for teaching purposes, and has written multiple computer science textbooks regarded as standard texts in the field. He regards his teaching job as his most important work.2004 article
about Linux, the Usenet debate, and the
Since 2004 he has operated Electoral-vote.com
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User Space
A modern computer operating system usually segregates virtual memory into user space and kernel space. Primarily, this separation serves to provide memory protection and hardware protection from malicious or errant software behaviour. Kernel space is strictly reserved for running a privileged operating system kernel, kernel extensions, and most device drivers. In contrast, user space is the memory area where application software and some drivers execute. Overview The term user space (or userland) refers to all code that runs outside the operating system's kernel. User space usually refers to the various programs and libraries that the operating system uses to interact with the kernel: software that performs input/output, manipulates file system objects, application software, etc. Each user space process normally runs in its own virtual memory space, and, unless explicitly allowed, cannot access the memory of other processes. This is the basis for memory protection in today' ...
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Intel 8080
The Intel 8080 (''"eighty-eighty"'') is the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel. It first appeared in April 1974 and is an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibility.'' Electronic News'' was a weekly trade newspaper. The same advertisement appeared in the May 2, 1974 issue of ''Electronics'' magazine. The initial specified clock rate or frequency limit was 2 MHz, with common instructions using 4, 5, 7, 10, or 11 cycles. As a result, the processor is able to execute several hundred thousand instructions per second. Two faster variants, the 8080A-1 (sometimes referred to as the 8080B) and 8080A-2, became available later with clock frequency limits of 3.125 MHz and 2.63 MHz respectively. The 8080 needs two support chips to function in most applications: the i8224 clock generator/driver and the i8228 bus controller. It is implemented in N-type metal-oxide-semiconductor logic (NMOS) usin ...
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ARM Architecture
ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures for computer processors, configured for various environments. Arm Ltd. develops the architectures and licenses them to other companies, who design their own products that implement one or more of those architectures, including system on a chip (SoC) and system on module (SOM) designs, that incorporate different components such as memory, interfaces, and radios. It also designs cores that implement these instruction set architectures and licenses these designs to many companies that incorporate those core designs into their own products. There have been several generations of the ARM design. The original ARM1 used a 32-bit internal structure but had a 26-bit address space that limited it to 64 MB of main memory. This limitation was removed in the ARMv3 series, which ...
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Motorola 6809
The Motorola 6809 ("''sixty-eight-oh-nine''") is an 8-bit microprocessor with some 16-bit features. It was designed by Motorola's Terry Ritter and Joel Boney and introduced in 1978. Although source compatible with the earlier Motorola 6800, the 6809 offered significant improvements over it and 8-bit contemporaries like the MOS Technology 6502, including a hardware multiplication instruction, 16-bit arithmetic, system and user stack registers allowing re-entrant code, improved interrupts, position-independent code and an orthogonal instruction set architecture with a comprehensive set of addressing modes. Among the most powerful 8-bit processors of its era, it was also much more expensive. In 1980 a 6809 in single-unit quantities was compared to for a Zilog Z80 and for a 6502. It was launched when a new generation of 16-bit processors were coming to market, like the Intel 8086, and 32-bit designs were on the horizon, including Motorola's own 68000. It was not feature competitiv ...
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Motorola 6800
The 6800 ("''sixty-eight hundred''") is an 8-bit computing, 8-bit microprocessor designed and first manufactured by Motorola in 1974. The MC6800 microprocessor was part of the Motorola 6800 family, M6800 Microcomputer System (latter dubbed ''68xx'') that also included serial and parallel interface integrated circuit, ICs, RAM, read-only memory, ROM and other support chips. A significant design feature was that the M6800 family of ICs required only a single five-volt power supply at a time when most other microprocessors required three voltages. The M6800 Microcomputer System was announced in March 1974 and was in full production by the end of that year. "Motorola's M6800 microcomputer system, which can operate from a single 5-volt supply, is moving out of the sampling stage and into full production." The small-quantity price of the MC6800 is . The MC6820 PIA cost . The 6800 has a 16-bit address bus that can directly access of memory and an 8-bit bi-directional data bus. It has 72 ...
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MOS Technology 6502
The MOS Technology 6502 (typically pronounced "sixty-five-oh-two" or "six-five-oh-two") William Mensch and the moderator both pronounce the 6502 microprocessor as ''"sixty-five-oh-two"''. is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by a small team led by Chuck Peddle for MOS Technology. The design team had formerly worked at Motorola on the Motorola 6800 project; the 6502 is essentially a simplified, less expensive and faster version of that design. When it was introduced in 1975, the 6502 was the least expensive microprocessor on the market by a considerable margin. It initially sold for less than one-sixth the cost of competing designs from larger companies, such as the 6800 or Intel 8080. Its introduction caused rapid decreases in pricing across the entire processor market. Along with the Zilog Z80, it sparked a series of projects that resulted in the home computer revolution of the early 1980s. Popular video game consoles and home computers of the 1980s and early 1990s, su ...
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Machine Code
In computer programming, machine code is any low-level programming language, consisting of machine language instructions, which are used to control a computer's central processing unit (CPU). Each instruction causes the CPU to perform a very specific task, such as a load, a store, a jump, or an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) operation on one or more units of data in the CPU's registers or memory. Early CPUs had specific machine code that might break backwards compatibility with each new CPU released. The notion of an instruction set architecture (ISA) defines and specifies the behavior and encoding in memory of the instruction set of the system, without specifying its exact implementation. This acts as an abstraction layer, enabling compatibility within the same family of CPUs, so that machine code written or generated according to the ISA for the family will run on all CPUs in the family, including future CPUs. In general, each architecture family (e.g. x86, ARM) has its own ...
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Object File
An object file is a computer file containing object code, that is, machine code output of an assembler or compiler. The object code is usually relocatable, and not usually directly executable. There are various formats for object files, and the same machine code can be packaged in different object file formats. An object file may also work like a shared library. In addition to the object code itself, object files may contain metadata used for linking or debugging, including: information to resolve symbolic cross-references between different modules, relocation information, stack unwinding information, comments, program symbols, debugging or profiling information. Other metadata may include the date and time of compilation, the compiler name and version, and other identifying information. The term "object program" dates from at least the 1950s: A computer programmer generates object code with a compiler or assembler. For example, under Linux, the GNU Compiler Collection com ...
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EM Intermediate Language
The EM intermediate language is a family of intermediate languages created to facilitate the production of portable compilers. The language's specifications were created by Andrew Tanenbaum, Hans van Staveren, Ed G. Keizer, Johan W. Stevenson and they were implemented in the Amsterdam Compiler Kit (ACK). Unlike the GNU Compiler Collection's (GCC) intermediate language, EM is a real programming language and could be implemented in hardware; a number of the language front-ends have libraries implemented in EM assembly language In computer programming, assembly language (or assembler language, or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as Assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence be .... EM is a relatively high-level stack-based machine, and one of the tools supplied with ACK is an interpreter able to execute EM binaries directly, with a high degree of safety checking. References * * * ...
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Bytecode
Bytecode (also called portable code or p-code) is a form of instruction set designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter. Unlike human-readable source code, bytecodes are compact numeric codes, constants, and references (normally numeric addresses) that encode the result of compiler parsing and performing semantic analysis of things like type, scope, and nesting depths of program objects. The name bytecode stems from instruction sets that have one-byte opcodes followed by optional parameters. Intermediate representations such as bytecode may be output by programming language implementations to ease interpretation, or it may be used to reduce hardware and operating system dependence by allowing the same code to run cross-platform, on different devices. Bytecode may often be either directly executed on a virtual machine (a p-code machine, i.e., interpreter), or it may be further compiled into machine code for better performance. Since bytecode instructions ar ...
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Intermediate Language
An intermediate representation (IR) is the data structure or code used internally by a compiler or virtual machine to represent source code. An IR is designed to be conducive to further processing, such as optimization and translation. A "good" IR must be ''accurate'' – capable of representing the source code without loss of information – and ''independent'' of any particular source or target language. An IR may take one of several forms: an in-memory data structure, or a special tuple- or stack-based code readable by the program. In the latter case it is also called an ''intermediate language''. A canonical example is found in most modern compilers. For example, the CPython interpreter transforms the linear human-readable text representing a program into an intermediate graph structure that allows flow analysis and re-arrangement before execution. Use of an intermediate representation such as this allows compiler systems like the GNU Compiler Collection and LLVM to b ...
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