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Re: RFC: Dropping the non-GCC bootstrap requirement
Andrew Pinski <pinskia@physics.uc.edu> writes:
>> Has anybody considered dropping the requirement of
>> being able to bootstrap from any C89 compiler?
>
> We just changed from any C compiler to C89 compiler, I would say no.
> Now a C99 compiler is a different issue but we should wait until we
> implement every part of C99 to get rid of the C89 dependent.
I can't countenance that either. Not until non-GCC C99 compilers are
commonplace, which I doubt will happen inside five years.
I care very strongly about this both on philosophical and practical
grounds. Philosophically, bootstrapping from a non-GCC compiler is an
important thing to make possible *even if* hardly anyone ever does it.
(I'm not feeling sufficiently philosophical right now to articulate
the rationale - it has to do more with people accusing "the FSF" of
certain categories of anticooperative behavior than anything else.)
Practically, I use a non-GCC compiler to build GCC on a regular basis;
GCC has a tendency to miscompile for the platform in question, so by
building it with the vendor compiler I can get a sanity check on
whether GCC itself has been miscompiled.
zw