[5] Anders Magnusson and Peter A Jonsson restarted development of pcc in 2007, rewriting it extensively to support the C99 standard.

The first C compiler, written by Dennis Ritchie, used a recursive descent parser, incorporated specific knowledge about the PDP-11, and relied on an optional machine-specific optimizer to improve the assembly language code it generated.

In contrast, Johnson's pccm was based on a yacc-generated parser and used a more general target machine model.

[9] There had been some speculation that it might eventually be used to supplant the GNU C Compiler on BSD-based operating systems,[10] though FreeBSD[11][12] and NetBSD[13] are both looking to Clang as a potential replacement, and Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD asserts that pcc is not ready yet to be a gcc replacement, and the disposal of gcc is not top priority.

[16] As of this release, the compiler supports x86 and x86-64 processor architectures and runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, various Linux distributions, and Microsoft Windows.