Re: RFC: GCC 4.4 criteria - add Fortran as primary language?

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

Tobias Burnus wrote:
> According to the GCC 4.4 Release Criteria, 
> http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/criteria.html, only C and C++ are primary 
> languages. And thus only C and C++ regressions can be release critical.
>
> I propose to add Fortran to these languages.

Thank you for the suggestion.

My opinion, however, is that C and C++ remain uniquely important.

I think that C is clearly the most important language supported by GCC. 
 It's the primary language of the GNU project and widely used on 
GNU/Linux systems.  I suspect that if you summed up all lines of code 
compiled with GCC on all computers in the world, C would be the #1 
language there.

I'm a C++ fan, of course, so I'm biased as to C++.  But, I think it's 
pretty clearly the second most used language in GCC, and things like KDE 
depend upon it.

I think Fortran is way down the list.  That's not about how good of a 
language Fortran is, or how solid the Fortran front-end is; it's just a 
comment about usage of GCC.

That said, I think that the RMs do -- and should -- pay attention to 
Fortran.  I just think that the statement that only C and C++ 
regressions are release-critical is important.

Thanks,

--
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery
mark@codesourcery.com
(650) 331-3385 x713