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KRoC, the Kent Retargetable occam Compiler, is an occam implementation that is based on the INMOS occam 2.1 compiler as a front-end and a retargetable back-end to produce machine code for various microprocessors. Ports of the compiler have been made for PowerPC, SPARC, x86 and Alpha processors.
Machine code is a computer program written in machine language instructions that can be executed directly by a computer's central processing unit (CPU). Each instruction causes the CPU to perform a very specific task, such as a load, a store, a jump, or an ALU operation on one or more units of data in CPU registers or memory.
A microprocessor is a computer processor that incorporates the functions of a central processing unit on a single integrated circuit (IC), or at most a few integrated circuits. The microprocessor is a multipurpose, clock driven, register based, digital integrated circuit that accepts binary data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and provides results as output. Microprocessors contain both combinational logic and sequential digital logic. Microprocessors operate on numbers and symbols represented in the binary number system.
PowerPC is a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. PowerPC, as an evolving instruction set, has since 2006 been named Power ISA, while the old name lives on as a trademark for some implementations of Power Architecture-based processors.
Along with the translation to different processors, the KRoC team have modified the compiler significantly, creating a compiler for what has become known as occam v2.5, and now as occam-pi.
Originally the translation from the occam compiler front-end was by interpretation of the ASCII assembly language file. This worked reasonably well but was slow and occasionally inconvenient.
ASCII, abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, although they support many additional characters.
The current KRoC compiler target is an Extended Transputer Code (ETC), which is then translated into the target machine language. ETC code can be viewed as a kind of byte code; it is a compact description of the compiler's intent on a Virtual Machine that is similar to the transputer.
The transputer is a series of pioneering microprocessors from the 1980s, featuring integrated memory and serial communication links, intended for parallel computing. They were designed and produced by Inmos, a semiconductor company based in Bristol, United Kingdom.
ETC-code variants of the KRoC compiler exist for Intel x86 on Linux, x86 on Windows using Cygwin, and a SPARC port is in the works.
Linux is a family of free and open-source software operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution.
Microsoft Windows is a group of several graphical operating system families, all of which are developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. Active Windows families include Windows NT and Windows Embedded; these may encompass subfamilies, e.g. Windows Embedded Compact or Windows Server. Defunct Windows families include Windows 9x, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone.
Cygwin is a POSIX-compatible environment that runs natively on Microsoft Windows. Its goal is to allow programs of Unix-like systems to be recompiled and run natively on Windows with minimal source code modifications by providing them with the same underlying POSIX API they would expect in those systems.
