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Comment by Veserv | Hacker News Reader

Just for some context, the MPW C compiler that produced those messages was actually not developed internally at Apple, but was rather done by Green Hills Software [1] under contract as mentioned on the wikipedia page [2] and its source [3] which is funnily enough about this exact same topic.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Hills_Software

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Wor...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20140528005901/http://lists.appl...

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I forget what happened to the Green Hills folks, but the official MPW C compiler was an offshoot of the MPW Pascal compiler, and was written by Roger Lawrence at Apple in about a year (around 1987-1988) largely as a reaction to what he thought was a terrible contract.

The Green Hills folks were likewise upset at Roger's effort. "Anyone who says they can write a compiler in a year should be fired." Roger himself held the same opinion, a couple of years later :-)

I sat next to Roger while he wrote that thing, he was in the next cubie over (I was working on the MPW linker and some other tools). He types really fast.

Hello from a guy who used your and Roger's work every day back then. Still one of my favorite developer experiences. (I ported an old-school AI application from its original Sun workstation environment to the Macintosh. Had a blast but our product crashed and burned with the AI winter).

> Anyone who says they can write a compiler in a year should be fired." Roger himself held the same opinion, a couple of years later

Nonsense.

Three of us did it in a year compiling a language similar to PL/M written in Bliss 36 on a PDP-10. And that was when compilers were much harder to do then than they are now.

> Anyone who says they can write a compiler in a year should be fired.

...why?

Well, they were clearly upset at losing the contract.

But mostly they were trying to say, "Okay, you probably have a guy who can do that. But it will be a buggy mess and it will go better if you don't give that dev permission to be a hero."

I still don't follow. A year seems like plenty of time to build a c compiler. Maybe it won't generate the best code, but no compiler did, back in the day.

I forget why I went into their building, but I always remember a giant T-rex skull in their entryway. I'm not making this up, am I?

I did find this press release, but it really just raises more questions than answers anything. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ubm-electronics-and...

I found a Green Hills page with a little more info.

https://www.ghs.com/news/20110427_esc_silicon_valley11.html

Sounds like GH's founder just really likes dinosaurs. (To be clear, if I was in that kind of financial position, I'd absolutely have a T-rex skull, or better yet the whole dinosaur, on display in the lobby).

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