Ask HN: If Unix is written in C, how did they run C before Unix?

Re:Ask HN: If Unix is written in C, how did they run C befor... by whitten on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @12:46PM (#35442467)

I think it was BCPL then B then C.

That is why there was a nerd joke that the follower language to C should be P, not C++

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Re:Ask HN: If Unix is written in C, how did they run C befor... by pjmlp on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @01:16PM (#35442901)

BCPL is actually the abbreviation of Bootstrapping CPL.

Originally BCPL wasn't going to be used for anything beyond bootstraping the CPL compiler, eventually it took a life of its own.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPL_(programming_language)

There is some irony that for UNIX workloads we are stuck with the evolution of a language whose main purpose was only to bootstrap a compiler and be done with it.

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Re:Ask HN: If Unix is written in C, how did they run C befor... by pizlonator on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @01:14PM (#35442874)

First Unix was written in asm. Then Ken came up with B to write some userland stuff more easily. B was not portable. B was a BCPL-like, but smaller and simpler.

Then Dennis came up with C. C was just portable B (it added types for the purpose of getting around the fact that word sizes differed between archs). And then the B code was recompiled with C and modified as needed. Though C is back-compatible to B somewhat (hence why C has the thing where no type implies int).

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