>
> > >
> >
> > Linux would have not been possible without the Gnu utilities and the
> > compiler used to built has ever been gcc. What would have been of
> > Linux if Gcc didn't exist? What of its performance if Gcc had been
> > mediocre? The only other 32 bits compiler I am aware of who was
> > freely available at the time Linux was written was bcc and the code it
> > generated was about two times slower than gcc's.
>
> Where would Linux be without XFree?
> Where would Linux be without the BSD components?
It would exist, it would not without gcc.
>
> bcc might have been bad then, but given the way of the free software
> world, probably someone would have fixed it.
>
A,d what about inline assembler, what about bugs in the generated
code, and what about the fact Linux neeeded to be fast at birth time
not five yeras later in order to capture the minds of users and
developpers?
Bcc was not the compiler for the job.
> Is gnu the only source of the utilities we have? Is there no other tar
> that could be used?
>
And that reminds me of those two studies about Unix utilities: the GNU
(thus Linux) utilities had far less bugs than the BSD-derived
utilities in proprietary Unixes. Good (nad often faster and more
featureful) basic utilities have also been a factor for Linux success
specially at its birrth when there was little software for it.
I still remember my disappointment in 1995 when I got an Aix station
and noticed that in many areas its software was inferior to Linux's.
> I know we use a lot of gnu software - every time I invoke info, I curse
> them (but let's not discuss info), but in many cases it's software that
> was reimplemented (such as bash) because someone thought it could be done
> better.
>
Info in the pre-HTML era allowed to have hypertext documentation,
something man pages didn't alloww and the real reader of info pages is
not the info program. It is Emacs. The info program was a kludge to
allow viewing info pages To VI users.
--
Jean Francois Martinez
Project Independence: Linux for the Masses
http://www.independence.seul.org
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