GCC 4.3.0 Status Report (2007-06-07)

[Brooks Moses]

Mark Mitchell wrote:
> Brooks Moses wrote:
>> Several members of the GFortran team (primarily Chris Rickett and Steve
>> Kargl) have been working on a project to add the BIND(C) functionality
>> from the Fortran 2003 standard.  This provides for a standard means of
>> linking Fortran code with code that uses standard C linkage conventions,
>> as well as adding some other useful features.
> 
> Thanks for making me aware of this project.
> 
> As with the Objective-C changes, I think that the Fortran team can
> decide to merge this in Stage 2, so long as its understood that any
> problems will be theirs to solve.

Ok.  So, if I'm understanding you correctly, it should either go in 
before the June 15th cutoff for the end of Stage 1, or it should wait 
until the end of the intermediate lockdown when Stage 2 opens?

When were you expecting to end the lockdown and open Stage 2?

>> IMO, for the Fortran front end, "regressions-only" is an inappropriate
>> criterion for this sort of mode, given that the front end does not have
>> a long history for the wrong-code and ICE-on-valid bugs to be
>> regressions against.
> 
> I think that's less true than it used to be.  It's true that gfortran is
> new-ish, and I've given the Fortran team a lot of flexibility in past
> release cycles.  But, congratulations are in order: gfortran is now a
> real Fortran compiler and people really are using it!  But,
> "regressions, wrong-code, and ICEs" isn't a bad criteria for this
> intermediate lockdown.

Thanks!

It's less true than it used to be, but at present Fortran has only five 
regressions filed against 4.3.  Three of them are against a single patch 
that's been reverted, one of the remaining ones is a regression from g77 
and is (practically speaking) really a matter of adding new 
functionality, and that leaves one -- which happens to be a particularly 
messy tangle.  So I'm glad we agree on criteria for the lockdown.  :)

> I do expect Fortran to honor the regressions-only rule once the 4.3
> release branch has been made.

I definitely agree with that.  I only realized how much effort we had 
been putting into backporting non-regression Fortran fixes to old 
release branches once we (largely) stopped doing it towards the end of 
the 4.2 release cycle.

- Brooks