Amsterdam Compiler Kit

Is this the same compiler that famously spurred Richard Stallman to create GCC [1] when its author "responded derisively, stating that the university was free but the compiler was not"?

It seems to be free now anyway, since 2005 according to the git history, under a 3-clause BSD license.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.en.html

It's interesting that they have a Raspberry Pi GPU backend, but neither an ARM backend nor any modern ISA. (such as x86-64, Aarch64, etc.) Is there any example program that actually runs on the rpi gpu? I skimped the website, but it is only mentioned in the release notes.

One of the first widely used compiler toolkits with multiple frontends, intermediate language for the phases and a common backend.

Contrary to common understanding LLVM wasn't the very first one, ACK also not, there are others predating it when diving into compiler literature.

I’m still making my way through the MINIX book. Love it.

Looks cool, last post in 2022 though? Is it feature complete?

Why the name amsterdam?

tl;dr: A kit for targeting several old or old-ish platforms, with code in some languages popular in the 1980s: C89 (ANSI C), Pascal, Modula 2, Basic. A 'kit' here means: frontend, codegen, support libraries and some tools. This is apparently known as being the default toolchain for Minix 1 and 2.

But - the repository is not "everything you need"; it actually relies on a lot from an existing platform - GCC, Lua, Make, Python etc. So, you would typically use this to cross-compile it seems.