Out of curiosity, is this purely enthusiast and hobbyist or do people do this for more than recreation?<p>Maybe there's say, large industrial machines (think like an oil refinery), infrastructure level computers (think the elevators of a skyscraper built in the 90s) or say, shipping vessels stuck with these chips and this is actually the cheapest solution, I have no idea.<p>It looks like the end of the line here was the MC88110 in 1992. Don't get me wrong, hobby away, I'm just curious if there's any production reason for this.
On a tangent, but the first m88k computer I recall hearing about was the Data General AViiON, which they advertised as "mainframe in a pizza box".<p>Looking for a copy of the ad just now, I found a neat writeup by the person who says they came up with it: <a href="http://www.georgelois.com/data-general.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.georgelois.com/data-general.html</a>
It looks like a pretty sophisticated GISel implementation, native without any DAGISel fallback. Pretty cool. They should probably email Chris Lattner for an ELF.h EM_xxx number even if they don't submit it.<p>I like it.
I wonder if LLVM is more open for keeping support for ancient systems like this in-tree than gcc.<p>I know a few people working on an LLVM backend for SGI MIPS CPUs, for example.<p>As I understand it, keeping an LLVM backend updated with the main compiler is far less work than keeping a GCC backend up-to-date, so the burden for supporting exotic/ancient systems is much lower
Oh my... might have to go dig out my MVME187 and the VME cabinet.<p>Or maybe I'll just fire up gxemul. Tough call.<p>Either way, very nifty. Thanks for sharing!
I wonder whether this project is based on the work in our M68k backend:<p>> <a href="https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/tree/main/llvm/lib/Target/M68k" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/tree/main/llvm/lib/Targ...</a>