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GCC 3.2.1 Released

Posted by timothy on from the collection-that-keeps-collecting dept.

Szplug writes "GCC 3.2.1 has been released; many C++ bugs, & notably for x86 users, MMX code generation has been fixed. From the notice, ".. the number of bug fixes is quite large, so it is strongly recommended that users of earlier GCC 3.x releases upgrade to GCC 3.2.1."
Here are overview and detailed change notices. Download here [gnu mirror site]."

3 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. But is it stable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ".. the number of bug fixes is quite large, so it is strongly recommended that users of earlier GCC 3.x releases upgrade to GCC 3.2.1." ...and if you're still using 2.95.3 for real work, continue to do so.

  2. Unless your a Mac OS X user by AIXadmin · · Score: 4, Informative

    Apple has been shipping 3.1 in the 10.2 development tools. Last time I checked Apple applied its own patches to gcc also, in the version it ships.

  3. Re:How about the Intel Compiler? by cimetmc · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think one of the main reasons why Intel does not contribute to GCC is not that they want to make money selling their compiler, but rather that they are not satisfied with the results of prior contributions they did to GCC. I might be wrong, but I think Intel contributed to GCC at least twice in the past. When the Pentium processor was released, Intel was quite dissatisfied by by the performance of the GCC code on Pentium processors, and so they took the GCC source code and made a number of improvements to it to generate much better Pentium code. They than gave back the modifed source code as some igcc compiler or so. This modified GCC compiler was then used as a bases of the PGCC compiler, but they were never really picked up by the GCC project until EGCS became GCC. Later on, I think Intel sponsored the GCC project to pay a developer to improve Pentium II support, but once again, it took I think something like 2 years until the contributed effort was mirrored in a released GCC version. So I think that in the end, Intel decided that it was not effficient to contribute to the GCC project as the contributions took too long to show an efffect on actual GCC compilers and this would make newer Intel processors run inefficiently for too long a time on GCC based systems. With their own compilers, Intel themselves are master of the release process, and they can make sure that they have a new compiler at the same time they officially start shipping a new processor generation. Finally, there is another big hurdle Intel may face. Especially processors like the Itanium and the P4 take a lot of modifications to the compiler to make efficient code. However because GCC has to support a wide range of processors, big architecture changes aren't easy to implement at the risk of breaking compatibility with other processors supported by GCC. So overall, I think Intel chose to make their own compilers because to them, that is the most efficient approach that guarantees them to have good compilers for new processors in an acceptable time frame. Marcel