Sun's unbundling of C and pricing questions

[Henry Balen]

aten at afcsa.af.mil (Bill Aten) wrote:
>Sun recently announced the release of Sun C 1.0 -- an unbundled C compiler
>which "will be the basis for all future C compiler performance
>improvements and feature enhancements".

Is this really going to be the only C compiler supported by Sun? What will
happen to the C compiler that comes with the system? What will happen in
the future... (Will Sun unbundle the linker?) Will they be taking the C
libraries off the system? (I was under the impression that C and it's
libraries were closely interwined with the UNIX system!)

On a more serious note, what happens to support for the C compiler that is
bundled in. Will Sun fix any bugs that a customer has come across? I was
under the impression that our maintenance contracts are for all the
software bundled into the system.

>From the rest of the article it appears that the C compiler will be
expensive for any serious development team (see Bill Aten's calculation
for the compiler on a Server with ten users!).

This leads on to other sources of C compilers. If you are developing Sparc
software I suppose you could always get a Solbourne -- they bundle in a C
compiler and a C++ translator! (and there is always GNU) I am not familiar
with some of the other compilers on the market, but I am sure that as the
Sparc gets more popular and `shrink wrap' software comes along then cheap
C compilers will also be available.

Henry Balen <balen at camscan.co.uk>

Camscan, Saxon Way, Bar Hill, Cambridge CB3 8SL, UK.