How I built a C compiler and web browser for the Am29000
How I developed an Am29000 C compiler and web browser
Oscar Toledo G. recounts how, at age 20, he wrote a C compiler and a web browser for his homebrew Am29000 computer. Faced with the processor's many registers and a machine with only 512 KB of RAM, he adapted his existing transputer compiler, building a register allocator and a dynamic expression tree. He also created a windowed operating system in machine code, and the article details the compiler's development, including code excerpts and the challenges of bootstrapping without a suitable compiler.
I couldn’t code new functions without devising a careful memory planning, how to move the code to make space, or worst, relocate several jumps and introducing unexpected bugs because I missed one change.