Re: GCC viciously beaten by ICC in trig test!

["Stephan T. Lavavej" <stl at caltech dot edu>]

[Scott Robert Ladd]
> Sometimes, I wonder if GCC should ship its own Standard C
> library, just as it ships a Standard C++ template library.
> However, I suspect the suggesting such a move might be a bit
> controversial... ;)

[Stephan T. Lavavej]
> Why doesn't it?

[Gabriel Dos Reis]
> This is a tricky issue. Some standards (e.g. POSIX) make
> conflicting requirements to that of ISO C standard,

[Kai Henningsen]
> Actually, POSIX takes great pains to *NOT* do that.

[Gabriel Dos Reis]
> and as a matter of fact demand that the C standard headers be
> modified.

[Kai Henningsen]
> Actually, POSIX says that any differences are dependant on
> prior definition of a preprocessor symbol in the
> implementation namespace. I believe this strategy was chosen
> with advice from the C standards committee.

[Gabriel Dos Reis]
> If GCC/gcc had to come with its own C headers, then it would
> have to implement those standards too -- in order to comply
> with user expectations.
> That is a mess and GCC has better not drive into that.

[Kai Henningsen]
> Actually, it seems that would be vastly cleaner than the
> contortions libstdc++ goes through. (And it would many such
> contortions unnecessary, as libstdc++ could count on support
> from libc.)

Great!

> The *real* problem is that available infrastructure between
> different OSes can differ just as much as different CPUs do,
> meaning you need a libc backend like you need the gcc
> backend. That is nontrivial.

Well, of course there would have to be vastly different implementations for
Windows versus GNU/Linux versus whatever other horrible operating systems
gcc runs on.  But gcc already uses the "separate implementation for
everything" approach with different processors.

If gcc were unified with a C library, it seems like things would be a lot
simpler, not only for libstdc++ and the rest of the compiler, but for users
with lousy C libraries supplied by their vendors.

[Kai Henningsen]
> really, binutils belongs with gcc more than glibc does.

And why isn't binutils part of gcc, for that matter?

Stephan T. Lavavej
http://nuwen.net