Re: Possible GCC contamination of Linux

Matthew Wilcox (Matthew.Wilcox@genedata.com)
Tue, 12 Oct 1999 13:12:47 +0200


On Tue, Oct 12, 1999 at 12:03:41PM +0200, Marc Espie wrote:
> In article <Pine.LNX.3.95.990922084259.6084B-100000@chaos.analogic.com> you write:
>
> >Of course you are correct. However, all compilers will always have
> >bugs. gcc-2.x.x.x is already obsolete. Nobody is fixing it. Now there's
> >egs.x.x.x, --many bugs --there is work being done to clean that up.
>
> Update your sources. egcs has been folded into gcc quite a few months ago,
> and gcc 2.95.1 is fairly stable, about on a par with 2.7.2 or 2.8.1 (not the
> same bugs, better code quality).

I think you're confused. If you read http://gcc.cygnus.com/,

``In April 1999, the egcs steering committee was appointed by the FSF as
the official GNU maintainer for GCC.''

and reading further down, you will notice:

September 3, 1999
Long time GCC contributors Mark Mitchell and Richard Kenner
have been given global write permissions. They are authorized
to install and approve patches to any part of the compiler.
Richard Kenner will initially be working on merging in the
remaining changes from the old GCC 2 sources.

If my memory serves me, egcs is based on a gcc 2 snapshot from about
9 months ago.

The observations are correct though, the generated code is superior and
it has a different set of bugs.

-- 
Matthew Wilcox <willy@bofh.ai>
"Windows and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of
specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a
painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture." - N Stephenson

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