The Amsterdam Compiler Kit

[Petrus]

Hi,
I hope nobody minds me sending this here, but I looked at the list of 
mailing lists on the web site, and this seemed like the most relevant place.

I was looking for alternate compilers to GCC a couple of days ago, and ended 
up finding the Amsterdam Compiler Kit. 
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/tack/)
It's the compiler that Andrew Tanenbaum is apparently using for Minix.  From 
what I read, it used to be commercial, and at one point Richard Stallman 
apparently actually asked him if it could be used as the basis of GCC, but 
it seems he was turned down.  As you can see from the address though, it is 
now on Sourceforge, and is under the BSD license.  I checked both Freshports 
and Google, and this apparently isn't something which anyone associated with 
FreeBSD has heard about yet, at least according to what Google brought up.

I adamantly hope that this is something that FreeBSD could eventually use. 
If it was, it could be a major step I'm assuming in removing the BSDs' 
reliance on the GNU project entirely.  Given the way the FSF has been 
behaving recently, that could only be a good thing.  Unfortunately my own 
knowledge of C in particular is more or less entirely non-existent, so I 
would be unable to help get it into shape.  It apparently only compiles 
binaries in the a.out format in particular, so I'm assuming that the FreeBSD 
developers would want to do at least some modification to it.
Petrus