No basic improvements branch for 3.5 - work on tree-ssa

[Richard Kenner]

    I don't see any reason to bump the minor version number if nothing is
    going to change.

Of course, but lots of people are doing lots of work.

    There's no question of tree-ssa not making 3.5, we would delay 3.5
    until it does make it as far as I'm concerned.  

I guess I wasn't clear.  I wasn't talking about it being ready in time
for the release since indeed I agree that if the experiment looks like it's
working, it would be worth delaying the release for it.

What I was talking about was when the branch would be ready to be
merged into the mainline.  If that was not right at the start of phase
1, it would then hold up lots of unrelated work unless somebody
extracted and merged them.  I don't see what we gain by merging these
two unrelated things.

    tree-ssa is the only hope I can see that GCC will ever be able to fix
    a critical failing that produces inferior C++ code.  Without it,
    there's no point to a 3.5 release.

That's a bit C++-centric, I'd say.  There's also C, Java, Fortran, and Ada.
It's certainly not inconceivable that a 3.5 release would make sense if it
produced significant enough improvements in those languages even if it
still had a performance problem with C++.