The last Pascal compiler developed at the Vrije Universiteit is the Pascal compiler in the Amsterdam Compiler Kit.
The Amsterdam Compiler Kit, ACK, is a venerable piece of software that dates back to the early 1980s. It was originally written by Andrew Tanenbaum and Ceriel Jacobs as a commercial product; for many years it was also used as Minix’ native toolchain. After eventually failing as a commercial project, it was made open source under a BSD license in 2003 when it looked like it was going to be abandoned and the code lost.
The ACK contains compilers for ANSI C, K&R C, Pascal, Modula-2, Occam 1, and a primitive Basic. It contains code generators for a large number of architectures, mostly 8 and 16 bit machines; there are also a set of generic optimisation, linker and librarian tools. Each language comes with its own runtime, so if you’re a C programmer you also get a libc. Compared to gcc, it is far smaller, faster and easier to port.
The ACK is still maintained by David Given at https://github.com/davidgiven/ack
It clearly shows that the base of the ACK was laid by the implementation of the Pascal-VU compiler as compiler to code for the virtual EM machine, evolved over time to suit the ACK.
