Re: Will tree-ssa be GCC 3.5?

[Scott Robert Ladd <coyote at coyotegulch dot com>]

Matt Fago wrote:
> It does seem that there are not enough informed supporters for GCC in 
> the labs, and I applaud you for your efforts. My own work as an ASCI 
> university collaborator has been hampered by the lack of a free F95 
> compiler, and I sincerely hope that you are able to convince ASCI to 
> support gfortran.

The question may well be settled, as I understand it. I don't know, 
though, if the chosen solution involves gfortran, Open64, or another 
project.

> It would seem that the labs could best support gfortran by funding 
> several of their own programmers (or ASCI university collaborators) to 
> contribute to gfortran, rather than shoveling money at some third party.

That was my original assumption of their intent. My lowly goal was to 
refute some of the views expressed in the ASCI paper, thus having those 
Lab programmers work on gfortran to the benefit of us all.

Alas, I was not as mercenary in my thinking as some others; I looked 
upon this as an opportunity to improve support for GCC as a whole. I 
wasn't looking to how I could profit -- a serious failing in an American 
capitalist, for certain. ;)

> Given the ubiquitous success of GCC, it seems obvious (?) that only GCC 
> could hope to provide this result without essentially duplicating GCC in 
> its entirely. However, the statement regarding the GPL is worrisome and 
> out-of-place considering the stated desire for an open-source tool. What 
> good is an open-source front end if the back-ends are all proprietary?! 
> Given the proper development support one would hope that GCC could meet 
> the 90% performance requirement.

These are some of the issues I was addressing privately with my 
correspondents at the Labs.

> The proper question then seems to me to be:
>
>    Can the lab requirements be sufficiently reconciled
>    with the goals of gfortran?

Good point. They seem to have come to a conclusion, although I am not 
privy to the specifics.

Thanks for the excellent post.

..Scott

--
Scott Robert Ladd
Coyote Gulch Productions (http://www.coyotegulch.com)
Software Invention for High-Performance Computing