Unit-at-a-time compilation

[Andrew Haley]

I had a strange sense of deja vu reading RMS's comments:

"I added a C front end [to the Pastel compiler], and began porting it
to the Motorola 68000 computer. But I had to give that up when I
discovered that the compiler needed many megabytes of stack space, and
the available 68000 Unix system would only allow 64k.

"I then realized that the Pastel compiler functioned by parsing the
entire input file into a syntax tree, converting the whole syntax tree
into a chain of "instructions", and then generating the whole output
file, without ever freeing any storage. At this point, I concluded I
would have to write a new compiler from scratch. That new compiler is
now known as GCC..."

:-)

http://www.fsf.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html