Re: GCC Release Status (2003-08-22)

[Karel Gardas <kgardas at objectsecurity dot com>]

On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Wolfgang Bangerth wrote:

>
> >| (Given that GCC 3.4 will be a "we break nearly all of your (non-ISO) C++
> >| programs" release, we may want to push it out the door relatively quickly
> >
> > I'm skeptical about that approach.  I believe that if GCC-3.4 is
> > rock-solid enough and does good jobs, then people will embrass it.
> > However, if it is released too quickly and we did not have enough time
> > to fix outstanding issues, then people will just ignore it and we
> > would miss audiance there.
>
> That is what happened with gcc 3.0. That was not a bad compiler, but people
> still didn't accept it because it broke their code. It took them quite a
> while until they realized that it is really _their_ code that's broken, not
> gcc, and that waiting for the next release is not going to improve their
> situation. I wouldn't be surprised if we had the same this time -- a good
> compiler without people using it.

I'm afraid I can not agree with you. Speaking for MICO project gcc3.0 was
broken compiler (remember virtual inheritance issues?) and was even broken
still in its fourth incarnation (gcc3.0.4) when we do not count with the
patch which was loaded into the contrib directory IIRC, but not integrated
into the compiler that time. So yes, for MICO first usable 3.x was 3.1.

> On the other hand, my feeling is that presently
> - the C++ part certainly has quite a number of things to fix; we get a pretty
>   continuous influx of bug reports with regressions on mainline. I wouldn't
>   want to go out the door in the present shape, but things have become much
>   better since the new parser went in.
> - there are presently about 50 C++ PRs targeted for 3.4. That is not
>   incredibly many, and I'm pretty certain that most of them will be fixed in
>   time.
> - overall, I think the C++ part is not in such a bad shape. I started working
>   on gnats about a year ago, and we had 570 open C++ reports back then.
>   We're presently at 330. Subtract the 50 that will have to be fixed for 3.4,
>   and we have a rather impressive improvement in this area. I think the C++
>   maintainers should really be commended for this!
> - I use mainline since May for my daily development. It's not that it would be
>   totally broken.

Here I agree with you. C++ in GCC is really better and better every year.
Thanks to all you working on such nice compiler!

Karel
--
Karel Gardas                  kgardas@objectsecurity.com
ObjectSecurity Ltd.           http://www.objectsecurity.com