Primix

[Steve Dyer]

Yes, I just spent 6 months of my life porting MAGIC, Berkeley's VLSI design
tool, from a VAX running 4.2BSD to a 9955 running PRIMIX.  It builds character!
Actually, it was a fascinating exercise in portability, and as for PRIMIX,
Prime's System V port running on top of PRIMOS, well, it's like Johnson's dog
walking on its hind legs: it's amazing that it works at all!  Still, all the
problems I came across in PRIMIX seemed fairly tractable; nothing that an
infusion of documentation and people and money couldn't cure (OK, a different
machine architecture would be nice, too... :-)).

PRIME's C compiler, a package developed separately from PRIMIX, doesn't
generate the fastest code right now, but it seems pretty bullet-proof;
we ran into remarkably few bugs in the compiler and libraries.  Their
PRIMOS debugger (which can be used for PRIMIX programs, with some restrictions)
is superb; it puts attempts like "dbx" to shame.
-- 
Steve Dyer
dyer at harvard.HARVARD.EDU
{linus,wanginst,bbnccv,harvard,ima,ihnp4}!spdcc!dyer