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GCC 3.2 Released

Posted by michael on from the fount-of-all-goodness-and-light dept.

bkor forwards the GCC 3.2 release announcement, without attributing it as such: "The GCC 3.2 release is now available, or making its way to, the GNU FTP sites. The purpose of this release is to provide a stable platform for OS distributors to use building their next OS releases. A primary objective was to stabilize the C++ ABI; we believe that the interface to the compiler and the C++ standard library are now stable. There are almost no other bug-fixes or improvements in this compiler, relative to GCC 3.1.1. Be aware that C++ code compiled by GCC 3.2 will not interoperate with code compiled by GCC 3.1.1. More detail about the release is available. Many people contributed to this release -- too many to name here!"

1 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. Stable C++ ABI??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Finally a stable C++ ABI ???

    1. This means that C++ _including objects+classes+ will, with a bit of grunt work, be able to be integrated with real-oo scripting languages just as easily as C - it's the constantly changing C++ ABI that has prevented, until now, "easy" bridging of, say, C++'s object model to Common Lisp's CLOS, without having to recompile everything in sight at the drop of a hat - it will now be possible to produce a C++-to-lisp analogue of, say, CMUCL's excellent "alien:" lisp package (nothing to do with the deb2rpm tool), or SWIG-but-for-proper+C++ for python and perl.

    2. It will mean that third-party binary distribution of C++ code is a lot more viable. Remember the way Netscape, Realplayer and flash used to break with every new RedHat release? - well, that was primarily becuase of libstdc++ not linking properly due to changing ABI.

    3. This should also mean that the prelink "hack" and it's ld.so-integrated successor can stabilise and become part of standard linux distros - no mare agonisingly slow KDE startup times!