by Oscar Toledo G. Sep/21/2026

A few weeks ago, I found a floppy disk containing my latest C compiler for transputer. It was enhanced to be compiled with Delorie's G++ or DJGPP (circa 1998). Of course, it generated a lot of warnings in compilation, but it worked just fine because it was a 32-bit compiler being compiled over a 32-bit Intel 80486 processor.

This was an intermediate step before converting it to generate code for an AMD Am29000 processor , and this version was further improved removing vestigial Small-C constructs to have a proper lexical analyzer, ANSI C syntax, and full preprocessor.

As a throwback exercise, I tried to compile the 1998 version of my transputer C compiler in a modern 64-bit computer, a Macbook Air M1, and I found a lot of difficulties.…