newsletter #10

[Mathieu Lacage]

hi all,

http://gccnews.chatta.us/

or, for your conveniance:

gcc release

Mark Mitchell sent in a gcc status summary[1] for gcc 3.4.2. He then
declared the 3.4.2 branch frozen[2], released[3] 3.4.2-RC1, then
3.4.2-RC2 and then 3.4.2[4].
Mark also sent in a gcc 3.5 status summary[5] which, not surprisingly,
triggered a few more or less angry mails about projects dropped in or
out of the 3.5 release. It is clear to everyone that if the 3.5 release
follows the path set forward by Mark, it will suffer from the
dot-zero[6] syndrome. Although some people are very unhappy by this and
would prefer to delay the release for a few months to try to make gcc
3.5 really better all the time than previous releases, this is unlikely
to happen (There is a strong argument against such a move since it is
well known that delaying a release to work more on it often,
strangely-enough, entices engineers to write more code and thus more
bugs. hrm. I certainly never do that, Do I ?).

gcc development

Daniel Berlin spent a bit of time gathering information on the current
register allocator work and on future directions. He summarized the
status of the current architecture in this mail[7]. Another thread was
started by Caroline Tice to provide a bit more information[8] on the
topic.
More compiler warnings are always good. It looks like the OpenBSD folks
added the sentinel (a [.] checker that can verify that varargs functions
such as execl(cmd, arg1, arg2, NULL) are indeed null-terminated (when
the arguments are constant)) attribute to their 2.95 gcc. Marc Espie
posted the patch[9] implementing this for 2.95 gccs. Hopefully, this
will get in someday.
Work on new optimization passes for gcc has not stalled despite the
tentative release schedule. Revital Eres sent a new version of his
Variable Exansion Optiomization[10] pass.

documentation

Anthony Green posted a link to the original design document[11] for gcj
by Cygnus back in the old days.
Thanks to Joe Buck and Daniel Berlin, the gcc summit proceedings have
now been split into separate papers and are hosted on gcc.gnu.org[12].

libstdc++

Contributed by jcopenha (jcopenha at typedef dot org)
 The libstdc++ mailing list is a rather low volume list. There were some
patches submitted this week. The first[13] being a fix for do_get_time
in time_get::get_time to handle leap seconds correctly. To stay in
alignment with C99 if _GLIBCXX_USE_C99 is defined the valid values for
seconds are 0 - 60, if using C89 0 - 61. An interesting paper on the
history of leap seconds[14] was also posted.
 The second was a fix[15] for PR libstdc++/17215, __basic_fileunderlying
fclose call. This meant the user never new if __basic_fileto soon, if
for instance fclose failed with EINTR. It was decided to mimic the read
and write behavior and loop on EINTR.

[0] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-08/msg01117.html
[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-08/msg01412.html
[2] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-08/msg01415.html
[3] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-09/msg00348.html
[4] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-08/msg01418.html
[5] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-08/msg01446.html
[6] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-08/msg00900.html
[7] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-08/msg00904.html
[8] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-08/msg01105.html
[9] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-08/msg01050.html
[10] http://www.spindazzle.org/cygnus/design.html
[11] ftp://gcc.gnu.org/pub/gcc/summit/
[12] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/libstdc++/2004-08/msg00215.html
[13] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/metrologia-leapsecond.pdf
[14] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/libstdc++/2004-08/msg00220.html



Mathieu
-- 
Mathieu Lacage <mathieu.lacage@sophia.inria.fr>