Re: Will tree-ssa be GCC 3.5?

[Phil Edwards <phil at codesourcery dot com>]

On Sat, Nov 29, 2003 at 05:47:32PM -0800, Jim Wilson wrote:
> There are a number of issues with tree-ssa that will cause problems for
> lots of people.
> 1) Loss of Ada support, until such time as the Ada front end is
> gimplified.  This will be a major problem for all Ada users.
> 2) Replacing the f77 front end with the f95 front end.  This will be
> noticed by many Fortran users.
> 3) Loss of all externally maintained front ends, such as Pascal and
> Mercury, until such time that they are all gimplified.
> 4) The addition of new infrastructure, which will require all gcc
> developers to re-educate themselves.
> 5) The addition of new optimization passes which are likely to cause new
> classes of bugs for users, and also probably new classes of features.
> I think these things are more easily explained with a major version
> number change.
> 
> If we maintain gcc3 in parallel with gcc4 for a while, then this gives
> us a chance to add in the tree-ssa stuff now even if it isn't perfect
> yet.  People can continue to use gcc3 if necessary until gcc4
> stabilizes.

I'm assuming that gcc 4 wouldn't actually be released until most of the
problems above are solved?

-- 
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
    - Brian W. Kernighan