I use f2c when I need to compile Fortran (or, more likely, Ratfor). Have GNU extended Fortran too? Or do you need to compile programs that make use of features added to Fortran by later standards (though I'm not sure that GNU Fortran will help here)?
I guess I don't see what's so offensive about rio and acme. A hazard is that once one starts adding things to attract novice users (e.g., shiney things) or people who are used to some particular (l)unix configuration (e.g., windows managers, graphical toolkits, the GNU world), the resulting system will be bigger, slower and clumsier. If you use gcc routinely, you lose the speed of 8c. As an example of the cumulative effect of such accretion, a friend reported compiling a Red Hat kernel from scratch recently and it only took about an hour (vs. the 10 minutes it took to compile V6 in 1977 on slow disks, or the 85 seconds to compile 9pc on oldish PC hardware today). It may not be feasible, for example due to gcc's asm constructs, but it would seem more satisfying to write a gcc-to-c preprocessor. Of course that doesn't help with C++; if only we had a Cfront for current C++.
