GCC – ‘We make free software affordable’

GCC and GNU Emacs are the two facets of the GNU operating system that have probably done more than any other to take GNU and free software from idealistic concept to a utilitarian reality. Having previously looked at GNU Emacs and the Hurd, Richard Hillesley looks at the history and progress of GCC.
GCC began life as the GNU C Compiler and achieved its first release on March 22, 1987. Michael Tiemann, who contributed as much as anyone to the later development of GCC, and who had dreamed of writing the perfect compiler, said that the day of GCC’s release was “the most thrilling and most terrifying day of my life (up to that point).”

“I had a decision to make,” he wrote on the twentieth anniversary of Richard Stallman’s first release of GCC. “I could join him, I could compete with him, or I could pick a new dream. I downloaded GCC version 1.0 and began a collaboration that would last for ten years (when, due to RSI, I gave up programming as a mainstream activity.)”

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