Can I interest you in the original Plan 9 compilers? Their source should be around somewhere and they don't do much in the way of optimization, if any, so they shouldn't any giant memory use problems.
My understanding is that the original C toolchain in Go (only recently removed in 1.5) was based heavily on the Plan 9 compilers.
In fact there was a rather inflammatory blog post[1] whose basic theme was that "Golang is trash" because the toolchain was so simple. One of the main Go developers then responded[2] on HN. Different people value different things I suppose.
I've hacked heavily with both; I've even compiled the Plan 9 kernel using Go's compiler+linker. The compilers are damn good. I went from no knowledge of 6[cl] (the amd64 compiler&linker) to pretty comfortable with the source in about 2 days.
Go uses customized but recognizable derivatives of the Plan 9 compilers. Go's compilers are really only intended to compile the Go tools, so you might find it painful to build anything else.
Getting 6c/6l/6a compiled on Linux would be easier these days because gcc's -fplan9-extensions flag will bring you pretty close... check out https://github.com/rminnich/NxM/tree/master/util for the source and scripts to build them on Linux. I believe you can make it output elf binaries but I've never tried using them to build a Linux program.
