Re: Upgrade now ?

[Gianni Mariani <gianni_nn1 at mariani dot ws>]

Dag Nygren wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Have been running gcc 2.95.3 for ages here and it seems to
> work OK.
> Now I would like some advice on a possible upgrade.
>
> 1. What are the benefits ?
> 2. Is 3.2 good/stable enough
> 3. Any drawbacks ?
> 4. Will my previusely compiled libraries work ?
>
> BRGDS
>  
It depends on what you want ?  C, C++, Java .... Linux, solaris, cygwin 
... ?

For C++ I find that the 3.2 compiler is better than VC++ in correctness 
and support but since we have VC++ (6.0) as a limitation we're stuck 
with what works for both.  ( So far only one nasty kludge, which is we 
have a macro named __gcc_typename that expands to 'typename' for gcc and 
the empty string for VC++ - and only in 2 places. )  The gcc2xx C++ 
compiler just isn't there.  I'm still keeping away from namespaces until 
gdb supports them.  It has become much better but I still get crashes in 
gdb when trying to examine classes derived from pure abstract base 
classes - which limits the ability to 'print this'.  
The gcc 3.0x compiler for solaris had issues, I never reported them 
because it was not trivial to track down but it looked like code gen 
errors - and then I wasn't sure becuase the debugger was not allways 
telling the truth.  The breakthrough came with gcc 3.1.1 for our solaris 
build where either I was able to get enough of a build to work or the 
code gen errors were fixed.

3.2 is a slower compiler (imho) and when we're doing optimized builds it 
can take a while the 2.xx compilers I seem to recollect as being much 
faster.  The project is not so big as this makes too much of a difference.

so:
1. C++ has big benefits in compliance.
2. 3.2 is stable enough
3. gdb sucks
4. Not in C++ they won't and why do you care so much.

G