GCC 3.5 Status (2004-08-29)

[Mark Mitchell]

Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:

>"Giovanni Bajo" <giovannibajo@libero.it> writes:
>
>| Mark Mitchell wrote:
>| 
>| > If people want to put GCC 3.5 off until next
>| > June, and SC approves, it's OK with me.
>| 
>| I think this should be seriously considered. Given the large number of
>| incomplete projects (partly merged like the vectorizer, or being worked on
>| offline), and the fact that we are currently maintaing *two* stable release
>| branches, I don't think we should *rush* at releasing 3.5. Waiting another 6
>| months could be a good compromise. What do others think about this?
>
>I agree with your general sentiment.  We rushed to release 3.4.0
>because it was thought 3.5.0 would bring the bonus of changes
>happening in 3.4.0.  
>
I disagree with that analysis.  GCC 3.4.0 was a pretty good release, as 
evidence by the fact that the major distros have moved to it or are 
moving towards it.  Certainly, it's the best C++ release we've ever had, 
and the generated code is better than previous releases.  In hindsight, 
the c-decl stuff was something of a mess, but it's hard to be perfect.

>What are our release criteria?  Sorry to ask the trivial, but it is
>because I'm unclear about what we're after.
>  
>
There is no single answer.  The GNU/Linux distro vendors want things, 
embedded people want things, hardware vendors what things, and other 
people want  things.  And, everyone wants the release schedule to line 
up with their own personal and/or organizational schedules.

As the RM, I want releases that are both timely and of high-quality.  
These two things cannot be entirely traded against each other: longer 
release cycles do not necessarily lead to higher quality.  In fact, they 
can lead to lower quality, as more and more changes go in, sometimes 
without corresponding problem-solving efforts.  I also don't think that 
"wait until it is ready" is a practical method for a project this big 
with this much change and with so much inter-dependency between components.

I think that GCC 3.5 is going to be a good release.  I also think that 
the first release with major new technology (tree-ssa is easily the 
biggest change to GCC in a decade) is going to have dot-zero properties: 
it won't work perfectly for all people all of the time.  Since everyone 
else (including Oracle, Microsoft, Red Hat, etc.) has that problem with 
huge revisions, I think we will have problems too -- independently of 
exactly when we do a release.  Oh, well.

I would like to get the other improvements in GCC 3.5.0 (new target 
support, etc.) released and I also think it would be very good for us to 
focus for a while on fixing bugs rather than adding features.

-- 
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
(916) 791-8304
mark@codesourcery.com