On 8-Dec-07, at 1:05 PM, Bradley Lucier wrote:
I believe the answer is roughly as follows.
There were various versions of Gambit that generated 68020 code for early macintoshes and BBN Butterfly computers, for example; the version that is now "Gambit" started as the version that generated "C" code, hence "Gambit-C".
Brad
That's the closest to the real answer.
Gambit (without the C suffix) is the generic name of the system which spans all possible target platforms. Up to now only two target platforms have been supported: initially Gambit had a back-end generating Motorola 68020 code (Sun workstation, Apple Macintosh, BBN butterfly multiprocessor, etc), then around 1994 a back-end generating C code was introduced. When the C back-end was released I decided to distinguish the systems with a suffix, so Gambit-68K was the first system and Gambit-C is the one generating C code. Note that at that point both front ends were identical, but the front-end of Gambit-C has evolved to support the C FFI and other extensions. I haven't worked on Gambit-68K in a long time, because my focus has shifted to portability rather than raw performance. Portability is the primary concern, followed by featurefullness, followed by performance. I think that's what most users want. Gambit-C is very portable, it works on any system with a decent C compiler (all the major workstations are covered of course, but Gambit-C has also been used on unusual target platforms such as the embedded PowerPC processor in Xilinx FPGAs and the ARM processor on the Nintendo DS). Gambit-C's abstraction of the target platform allows using it as a virtual machine (so that the same program will work on Unix, MacOS, Windows, and other systems with no modifications). Sorry, I'm rambling...
Marc