Re: Compiler for Red Hat Linux 8

[Craig Rodrigues <rodrigc at mediaone dot net>]

On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 01:20:07PM -0700, Geoff Keating wrote:
> 
> At present, we have three compilers for the linux releases.  There is
> the default compiler, which is currently based off a 2.96 snapshot.
> There is a special compiler for the kernel, which is based off egcs
> 1.1.2.  There is also a GNUPro compiler, which is a Red Hat-released
> compiler on which we offer full support; it came out of the Red Hat
> internal tree.
> 
> We'd really like to get this list down to one compiler.  These
> compilers have subtle incompatibilities with each other, and it's really
> annoying that we can't fully support the compiler that comes with the
> system.
> 
> So, one plan being considered is that we take a compiler out of the
> Red Hat internal tree (based sometime after 3.0), make a release, and
> ship that as the default compiler.  Then if we can make the kernel
> work with this compiler, we have one compiler, which we can fully
> support.  We didn't have time to do either of these for RHL 7, but we
> do for RHL 8.

I (and my customers) use a lot of Red Hat Linux systems.
I do primarily C++ development, and the bugs in the gcc 2.96
versions of the Red Hat compilers have caused problems for
me on real-world C++ projects:

http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=48835

gcc 3.0 is a fantastic achievement, and hopefully will encourage
the wider adoption of the C++ Standard Library for C++ developers
who use gcc.  To avoid problems with gcc 3.0, I have
done a lot of testing with the snapshots provided by CodeSourcery,
and reported bugs when I've found them.
Most things in gcc 3.0 work for me, except for PR 3189, which I filed
too late for it to be considered a blocking bug for gcc 3.0 to be released:

http://gcc.gnu.org/cgi-bin/gnatsweb.pl?database=gcc&pr=3189&cmd=view

My recommendation would be for Red Hat to try to release gcc 3.0
as their default compiler, and work with the other free software
projects (Linux kernel, glibc) to make sure that everything compiles with it.
Also, frequently contributing bugfixes back to the FSF mainline gcc branch
so that the fork doesn't diverge too much would be good.

In addition, working with other C++ free software projects with
large user communities such as ACE (http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html)
to insure that the Red Hat release of gcc can compile these projects
would be welcomed.
-- 
Craig Rodrigues        
http://www.gis.net/~craigr    
rodrigc@mediaone.net