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Re: Beyond GCC 3.0
- To: dewar at gnat dot com
- Subject: Re: Beyond GCC 3.0
- From: Joe Buck <jbuck at synopsys dot COM>
- Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 21:40:23 -0700 (PDT)
- Cc: jbuck at synopsys dot com, rjschwei at mindspring dot com, gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
> <<Code that complies with standards will not have to be changed. It will
> always work, modulo bugs in the compiler. >>
>
> Sure, but this is a theoretical rather than pragmatic comment. In
> practicew any large commercial application with millions of lines of code
> will not be 100% compliant, and will depend on all sorts of implementation
> behavior, and features outside the standard.
Clearly maintainers of large programs will need to re-test their programs
with any major or minor release. If those maintainers expect to use GCC,
it will pay for them to test their code with development snapshots on
occasion, to help ensure that bugs either in GCC or their own software get
fixed as soon as possible.
Otherwise the only answer is to keep using the same compiler, on the
theory that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".