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

[John Vickers]

Richard Kenner wrote:
> 
>     I guess if there were a load of people saying "I Don't Want any more
>     C++ changes !" - or somesuch - egcs could bring out 1.0.4 & 1.0.5,
>     while releasing 1.2.  But I'm not aware that there's much call for
>     that kind of stability (not that I'm likely to be particularly well
>     informed in this matter).  If the user really want's stability, they
>     can carry on using the same compiler version.
> 
> Front end changes aren't the issue, it's optimizer changes.
> 
> The Linux community, though becoming increasingly commercial, has
> traditionally been one of wanting "the latest and greatest of anything"
> (and, by the way, that attitude is a major restraint on the growth rate).

As it happens, I'm not sure that's a good example for you,
since the Linux people have had difficulties
with their elaborate asm's under egcs.

> 
> The users I'm talking about are in the traditional area for GCC of embedded
> systems and the vendors that target them.  They certainly want to be able to
> give their users the benefit of new optimization technology, but have a very
> high cost of changing compilers and so only want to see a major feature when
> it's completed, not when it's in progress.

Are we talking about stability or reliability now ?

Well fine, what's the problem - if they're worried about new features in
X.Y.0,
they should do a load of testing themselves and/or wait for X.Y.1.

As was said before, egcs testing is a whole lot more thorough
now than gcc testing is or ever was.

As Alexandre said, egcs hasn't made radical optimisation changes.
If it did, who cares what happens under the bonnet,
so long as the damm thing works.

I *am* an embedded developer, and have been for several years now.
I don't (personally) see major costs in switching between gcc & egcs,
compared to the costs of switching between either of those and a
compiler
from a completely different stable.  Indeed, I worked on development
projects where the compiler used changed three times in six months
within the
egcs/gcc family (only counting major versions) without any
disruption noticeable to me at all.
There are certainly some potentially big issues with the evolving C++
implementations, but in practice I haven't seen them.  My experience
isn't with a *vendor* of embedded development systems, which is more
what
you're talking about, but it does include development from the bare
board
up (from the schematic up, sometimes), with an number of gcc family
compilers.

John.