Plauger's books are good reading! I'm sorry to hear he's not in good health.
Not to take anything away from Whitesmiths†C, which has a good reputation, but if you're interested in a C compiler for CP/M,
BDS C is fully open source and free software, and also was well regarded. But it's written in assembly, and its compatibility with other C compilers (this was long before ANSI) leaves much to be desired.
We can hope that eventually the Whitesmiths licensing is cleared up, especially since the source is evidently in C. It would be great to have a fully self-sufficient free software development environment that could run on something as simple as an 8080 (6000 transistors, I think NMOS and therefore about 2000 gates) and didn't require you to dip into assembly all the time.
We can probably do better than the 8080 today. Graeme Smecher's Minimax, or Chuck Moore's MuP21 or F18A, seem like they would be a lot more comfortable to program on, and they're not much bigger. The MuP21 was 7000 transistors including ugly video output, with 21-bit words instead of 8-bit, and gsmecher's Minimax is a 32-bit RISC-V in 507 LUT6s, which I don't think anyone has done an ASIC of.
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†Blacksmiths make hardware, so who makes software?
Not to take anything away from Whitesmiths†C, which has a good reputation, but if you're interested in a C compiler for CP/M, BDS C is fully open source and free software, and also was well regarded. But it's written in assembly, and its compatibility with other C compilers (this was long before ANSI) leaves much to be desired.
We can hope that eventually the Whitesmiths licensing is cleared up, especially since the source is evidently in C. It would be great to have a fully self-sufficient free software development environment that could run on something as simple as an 8080 (6000 transistors, I think NMOS and therefore about 2000 gates) and didn't require you to dip into assembly all the time.
We can probably do better than the 8080 today. Graeme Smecher's Minimax, or Chuck Moore's MuP21 or F18A, seem like they would be a lot more comfortable to program on, and they're not much bigger. The MuP21 was 7000 transistors including ugly video output, with 21-bit words instead of 8-bit, and gsmecher's Minimax is a 32-bit RISC-V in 507 LUT6s, which I don't think anyone has done an ASIC of.
______
†Blacksmiths make hardware, so who makes software?