Re: GCC2 merging (was "native language support now available")

[kenner at vlsi1 dot ultra dot nyu dot edu (Richard Kenner)]

    Correct.  So if gcc2 were more reliable than egcs, that would be an
    argument in its favor.  Is it?

There's no way to know, because there's no good way of measuring reliability;
it's not at all simply a matter of the number of bugs.

    The answer, unfortunately, is that it is not.  The reason is that egcs
    has not only been more successful in recruiting developers, but also
    in recruiting testers and in doing tests in a consistent manner.

You mean overall testing.  People in the software engineering community often
say that such testing isn't very valuable.  The kind of testing that's the
most important in producing high reliability software is *unit testing*,
which means testing each function individually to make sure it meets its
specifications under all conditions.  As far as I know, this is not done for
either gcc2 or egcs.

An interesting exercise would be to look at the ISO 9000 standard and see if
either project meets it and to try to figure out what SEI level each project
has.

It is possible to derive *some* information from bugs, but what you have to
look at is not the number of bugs but the nature of each in detail.  I'm not
that familiar with the work that's been done in that area.