The ACK's notability stems from the fact that in the early 1980s it was one of the first portable compilation systems designed to support multiple source languages and target platforms.[2][3]
The ACK was known as MINIX's native compiler toolchain until the MINIX userland was largely replaced by that of NetBSD (MINIX 3.2.0) and Clang was adopted as the system compiler.
It was originally closed-source software (that allowed binaries to be distributed for MINIX as a special case), but in April 2003 it was released under the BSD licenses.
Working principle
Maximum portability is achieved by using an intermediate language using bytecode, called EM. Each language front-end produces EM object files, which are then processed through several generic optimisers before being translated by a back-end into native machine code.
ACK comes with a generic linker and librarian capable of manipulating files in the ACK's own a.out-based format; it will work on files containing EM code as well as native machine code. However, EM code cannot be linked to native machine code without translating the EM binary first.
Target processors
ACK backends can produce native machine code for a wide range of CPUs, even starting with small 8 bit CPUs.
65C124 - used for the first software controlled implantable defibrrillator, the target was unique in that the C/EM code word size was 1 byte for an int and 2 bytes for a long.
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