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Re: History of GCC
- From: Joel Sherrill <joel dot sherrill at oarcorp dot com>
- To: Ian Lance Taylor <iant at google dot com>,Will Hawkins <whh8b at virginia dot edu>
- Cc: GCC Development <gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org>
- Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2016 09:20:20 -0400
- Subject: Re: History of GCC
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <CAE+MWFvVTkYjypsL3PLDk=qx_+VDNwRR0=YRN_dMqQHsDpNynw@mail.gmail.com> <CAKOQZ8xF6+_pSbnQ1Ku=PuF8Wkfq7siXHA47fQbGzAO29kSxvg@mail.gmail.com>
On October 26, 2016 9:07:16 AM EDT, Ian Lance Taylor <iant@google.com> wrote:
>On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 10:53 PM, Will Hawkins <whh8b@virginia.edu>
>wrote:
>>
>> My name is Will Hawkins and I am a longtime user of gcc and admirer
>of
>> the project. I hope that this is the proper forum for the question I
>> am going to ask. If it isn't, please accept my apology and ignore me.
>>
>> I am a real geek and I love the history behind open source projects.
>> I've found several good resources about the history of "famous" open
>> source projects and organizations (including, but definitely not
>> limited to, the very interesting Free as in Freedom 2.0).
>>
>> Unfortunately there does not appear to be a good history of the
>> awesome and fundamental GCC project. I know that there is a page on
>> the wiki (https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/History) but that is really the
>> best that I can find.
>>
>> Am I missing something? Are there good anecdotes about the history of
>> the development of GCC that you think I might find interesting? Any
>> pointers would be really great!
>>
>> Thanks for taking the time to read my questions. Thanks in advance
>for
>> any information that you have to offer. I really appreciate
>everyone's
>> effort to make such a great compiler suite. It's only with such a
>> great compiler that all our other open source projects are able to
>> succeed!
>
>There is some history and links at
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection .
>
>In my opinion, the history of GCC is not really one of drama or even
>anecdotes, except for the EGCS split.
I am not even sure that is interesting except as an example of an experiment to change the development model that worked. But that should all be covered somewhere online.
--joel
>There are plenty of people who
>work on GCC out of personal interest, but for decades now the majority
>of work on GCC has been by people paid to work on it. I expect that
>the result is less interesting as history and more interesting as
>software.
>
>Ian
--joel