Re: GCC 3.0 Release Criteria

[Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha at arm dot com>]

> If we have lots of first-tier platforms, we will face additional
> burdens.  All of the tests must work on all of the first tier
> platforms.  That will require considerable effort -- not just to fix
> bugs in the compiler but also to make sure that the test applications
> work on these systems.
> 
> When I prepared the list, I thought pretty hard about this.  I know of
> probably ten or so major platforms not represented on the list.
> Windows NT, Unixware, OpenServer, flavors of BSD, and other flavors of
> Linux lead the list, but there are other platforms (like NCR MP-RAS,
> for example) that are still pretty actively in use.
> 
> I worked hard to get the major chips, and the major OS's on the list.
> The reason, for example, for picking IRIX 6.5 is that it is pretty
> widely used, GCC works pretty well there already, and, most
> importantly, it's a good MIPS testbed.  MIPS chips are widely used in
> embedded systems, but it's harder to test there; we test many aspects
> of MIPS code-generation on IRIX.

Sorry for the delay getting involved in this discussion; I've been on 
leave for the past ten days or so, so I'm now trying to catch up with the 
deluge of email I've received over that time.

I realize that you are fighting the slippery-slope syndrome here, but in 
my opinion (which I will admit is not completely unbiased ;-) you've 
completely missed out a major embedded processor from your list -- ARM.  
Given your reasoning for adding MIPS/IRIX; I think you should equally 
consider ARM/linux in this position.

Richard.