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Re: Of Bounties and Mercenaries
On Wed, Apr 07, 2004 at 01:25:58PM -0700, Tom Lord wrote:
> > bootstrap starting from several non-GCC compilers and determine
> > whether you always get the same bits. Use cross-compilation
> > too. You then will prove that either your GCC binary does not
> > have the Thompson hack, or else that all the free and
> > proprietary compilers you tried have the same hack, so cleverly
> > designed as to be cross-platform.
>
> Well, "same bits" is going to be hard to evaluate given differences
> and chaos in code generation.
You misunderstand. "same bits" means "same bits". gcc's three-stage
bootstrap should produce identical bits regardless of the bootstrap
compiler. It is designed to eliminate effects caused by different
starting compilers. The compiler compiles itself with itself.