Re: [PATCH INSTALLED]: const typedefs part 19/N

["Daniel Berlin" <dberlin at dberlin dot org>]

On 8/28/07, Dave Korn <dave.korn@artimi.com> wrote:
> On 28 August 2007 15:16, Daniel Berlin wrote:
>
> > On 8/28/07, Eric Botcazou <ebotcazou@libertysurf.fr> wrote:
> >>> That said, I vote for forcing stage1 to be build with a C++ compiler for
> >>> next stage1.
> >>
> >> I don't think it's reasonable to require a C++ compiler to build the GNU C
> >> compiler, especially on non-GNU platforms.  You may only have a C compiler
> >> in the default installation and it should be sufficient to bootstrap GCC.
> >>
> > We already require an ISO C compiler which some platforms do not
> > provide.  We already have a list of requirements necessary to do
> > development of our compiler that include a bunch of other packages.
> > Why is "Any version of G++ > 3.0" somehow different?
>
>   Because it completely excludes *all* native compilers?

Okay, so make it "ISO C++ compiler", just not "let's hack shit up to
make it work on Visual C++".
> Because it's a radical
> about-turn and 180 degree shift in long-standing policy?
>
Not really.
We have always changed what we require in response to data that it
will promote the long term health and maintenance of GCC.

See GMP/MPFR.

I see this as no different.  We have reached a point where more than a
few of us want to do things that would be really ugly to do in C.
Heck, we reached that point a while ago.
We've kludged the compiler for years to try to emulate the nice things
we wanted out of C++ (see "union tree", variable annotations, GTY,
etc), and it's really getting ugly now.   At some point it doesn't
make sense to emulate the language anymore.  I believe we are past
that point.

--Dan