old intentional gcc bug?

[Ian Lance Taylor]

Brooks Moses <brooks.moses@codesourcery.com> writes:

> Indeed.  It would be interesting to confirm whether or not a copy of
> gcc bootstrapped with a non-gcc compiler matched byte-for-byte with a
> copy of gcc bootstrapped from gcc.  Not so much to look for
> intentional things like this, but to see whether the bootstrapping
> actually does achieve its goal of obtaining a result that's
> independent of the bootstrapping compiler.  Has anyone actually tried
> it?

At Cygnus, in the early and mid- 90s, we did this routinely, starting
with the native compilers shipped with various Unix variants.  As Unix
variants generally no longer come with a free (as in beer) compiler
other than gcc, this is harder to test today.  Still, not too hard:
you would just start with some other free compiler.

Ian