Re: GCC Release Status (2003-08-22)

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

On Fri, 2003-08-29 at 14:19, Wolfgang Bangerth wrote:
> >| (Given that GCC 3.4 will be a "we break nearly all of your (non-ISO) C++
> >| programs" release, we may want to push it out the door relatively quickly
> >
> > I'm skeptical about that approach.  I believe that if GCC-3.4 is
> > rock-solid enough and does good jobs, then people will embrass it.
> > However, if it is released too quickly and we did not have enough time
> > to fix outstanding issues, then people will just ignore it and we
> > would miss audiance there. 
>  
> That is what happened with gcc 3.0. That was not a bad compiler, but people 
> still didn't accept it because it broke their code. It took them quite a 
> while until they realized that it is really _their_ code that's broken, not 
> gcc, and that waiting for the next release is not going to improve their 
> situation. I wouldn't be surprised if we had the same this time -- a good 
> compiler without people using it.
> 
> On the other hand, my feeling is that presently
> - the C++ part certainly has quite a number of things to fix; we get a pretty
>   continuous influx of bug reports with regressions on mainline. I wouldn't
>   want to go out the door in the present shape, but things have become much
>   better since the new parser went in.

I think that -- besides a few critical bugs -- the C++ front end is
actually in good shape.  A lot of the regressions are pretty obscure, or
are pretty harmless.  The number of ICE-on-valid and wrong-code
regressions is very small, and the number of such bugs fixed is very
large.  

I don't think we'll have any trouble getting to a release on the C++
front.

Compile times are another major story.  I'm not sure what the full
situation is at this point, and I'm not sure we even know what
apples-to-apples means.  For example, should we assume people will be
using PCH?

-- 
Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com>
CodeSourcery, LLC