Long term viability of GCC (was Re: gcc : c++11 : full support : eta?)

[Alec Teal]

On 23/01/13 19:38, Diego Novillo wrote:
> [ We have drifted way off the original subject. ]
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Uday Khedker <uday@cse.iitb.ac.in> wrote:
>
>> Yes, absolutely. And GCC community should consider it important to bring in
>> newcomers particularly young students and experimenters from the academia.
>>
>> Why is it that most student projects these days are on LLVM and not on GCC?
>> Had these students been doing projects on GCC, some of them may turn
>> contributors in future.
> Yes.  This is an issue for the long term viability of GCC as a
> project.  In fact, I sometimes think that we may be past the tipping
> point.
>
> Note that the very set of developers that can fix these problems are,
> traditionally, the least likely to do much about it.  These developers
> are already comfortable with the codebase, they know how to do the
> things they are hired to do and employers are largely on the same
> boat.  Additionally, established developers will generally resist
> change, because these changes lead to short-term instability and bugs
> (the releng/maintainer mindset).
>
> Evolving this codebase is largely a thankless and difficult job.  It's
> technically interesting to me, but I know I can only do so much.  We
> have other demands on our time and often this conflicts with the
> nature of these changes.  Some developers have done some work here and
> there to improve the codebase, but GCC's accumulated technical debt is
> large.
>
> If this trend continues, the pool of experienced GCC developers will
> eventually start to dwindle.  Without developer renewal, GCC will
> naturally die out.  This cycle has happened many times before and it
> will continue to happen.  Yet, it would be interesting to have two or
> more strong competing open source compilers.  The cross-pollination
> that open source competition encourages is beneficial to all (users
> and developers).
>
>
> Diego.
>
As I am happy to be finding out though, even from RTL (old pdfs and 
stuff :)) GCC wasn't what I thought it was, to quote earlier:
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I really have a theory here, I think (like me! I came here in the hope of
'fixing' GCC from what I thought it was to what it is because I, suppose I
am loyal, I don't really like BSD, the lack of obligation to keep things
free, anyway that'll start a dispute probably so don't worry) it's all the
bad press, my impression was GCC is really old and archaic, not very good
for developing new optimisations, had a crap IR and there was this newcomer
that only made these problems known because it fixes them.
 >
I know now that most of them were wrong BTW!
Ah, well - the old issue that LLVM has just become a very good
marketing machinery
(and we've stayed at being a compiler - heh).

Richard.
<
You see my point though right?
Alec
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Is it not just bad press? The articles perpetuate the "Wow look how easy 
clang is" which no one expects of GCC.

Alec