Revised release criteria for GCC 4.0

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Hans-Peter Nilsson wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
> 
>>We also have a GDB simulator for the AVR, but I'm afraid nobody ever
>>tried running the Dejagnu testsuite with it.
> 
> 
> I don't see an avr simulator in src/sim.  I do see a m68hc11
> simulator.  For this reason *only*, I'd prefer that any
> few-bits-arch attention be covered by the m68hc11 port
> (or hc12 if you prefer).

Agreed.

> The presence of a turn-key simulator as per simtest-howto.html
> makes it *immensely* more simple for others than hardware
> holders to regression-test their GCC changes, verify bugs and
> fix them.  So all the shouting from AVR enthusiasts is suggested
> be better spent getting an AVR simulator and a newlib port in
> the tree.

The avr target uses avr-libc.  newlib has never
been ported to it and libgloss even fails to compile
when I build in the uberbaum tree.

The number of targets who decided to rewrite their
own libc implementations is simply amazing.

One would expect that rewriting yet another C library
from scratch ought to be a huge waste of time and
probably a boring task.

A possible explanation is that existing libraries
such as glibc are huge and hard to understand.
Other libraries are simply not portable enough
(avr-libc) or designed with some OS in mind (uClibc).

When someone ports GCC to a new embedded processor,
it's easier to cherry pick a few useful ANSI functions
until you can get an hello world program to work.

-- 
  // Bernardo Innocenti - Develer S.r.l., R&D dept.
\X/  http://www.develer.com/