GCC 4.4.0 Status Report (2008-11-17)

[Bradley Lucier]

There has been some discussion here of GCC's reputation and of how to  
classify bugs.

This bug

http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=26854

has gradually morphed from a compile-time issue to a space issue; if  
it's not fixed for 4.4 (and it appears that it will not be fixed in  
that time frame) then there will have been two consecutive major gcc  
releases where I cannot use the compiler to build one of my  
applications on the machines in my office and at home because they  
each have "only" 8GB of RAM.  The servers at work have 16 and 32GB of  
ram, so I can still build and test it there.

Over the years I have tried to test prerelease versions of gcc with C  
code that is generated by the Gambit Scheme compiler; that code seems  
to be different enough from other tests that it has revealed some  
bugs or inefficiencies in GCC, and people have been very helpful in  
fixing those bugs and eliminating those inefficiencies.  And GCC has  
several features (computed gotos, ___builtin_expect, ...) that the  
Gambit Scheme compiler now exploits to generate faster code, so  
certainly the Gambit Scheme community appreciates GCC.

But now that 4.3.* and (soon) 4.4.* are pushed out to the general  
public, I have to admit to the other people using Gambit that yes,  
recent versions of GCC require markedly more resources to compile  
code than older versions did.  And, for some applications, the code  
runs more slowly: because of

http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=33928

basically all nontrivial operations on large (> 20,000 bits) bignums  
are 10% slower when compiled with 4.3.* and 4.4 than with previous  
compilers.

I really appreciate how helpful the GCC community has been over the  
years and the product that community produces, but I can't see how  
recent versions of GCC can avoid having a worsened reputation among  
at least this small group of users.

Brad