Re: Branching for GCC 3.0

[Brad Lucier <lucier at math dot purdue dot edu>]

> From mitchell@codesourcery.com  Sun Jan  7 17:52:38 2001
> 
>     Brad> Considering how many years Sun's 64-bit Ultrasparc
>     Brad> implementation has been out without proper support from gcc,
>     Brad> this may be considered an embarrassment.
> 
> It's the usual volunteer-driven thing; there's been eons of time to
> get 64-bit Ultrasparc into GCC, and if it hasn't happenned yet, that
> can only indicate that it is either hard, or that nobody has been
> terribly motivated.

I've assumed for some months (years?) that some people are getting paid
to work on gcc; the amount of effort that many people are putting into
it seems far beyond what would be possible on a volunteer basis.

So if Sun paid Red Hat to have Jakub work on the subreg-byte branch,
maybe it's Red Hat that should be embarrassed that it isn't ready for
3.0?  (1/2 :-)

As a side remark, Jakub has posted (excellent) regression results for
the subreg-byte branch from last July, so it seems to have been in
pretty good form for some time.

Personally, I've basically given up on gcc on Sparc; since I bought an
Alpha machine, I've been doing nearly all my heavy-duty work on the
alpha.  Until Jeff pointed it out, I hadn't realized how big a job it
might be to merge the subreg-byte branch; I had assumed that a merge
would not be so bad, and that it could be done in time for the branch.

Brad