GCC 3.3 Update Status on NetBSD

Dan writes "Matthew Green says that the gcc3 update on NetBSD is going well. They are almost ready to switch several platforms including i386, sparc, sparc64, arm, mipsel, alpha. Mipseb and m68k are almost done. Sets lists need to be updated and building more kernels with gcc3.3 are the things still pending."

Comments

Waiting for 3.4

[Markus Registrada]

I hope they are not planning to stick with 3.3 for the indefinite future. Gcc-3.4 is where the major improvements are going, and its ABI is meant to be stable for a long time. The 3.3 series is just for practice, as it were. For example, getting iostreams to take advantage of NetBSD's UVM, and expose zero-copy I/O at the user level, will happen early in the 3.4 series. 3.4 is getting precompiled headers and other practical work on faster compilation.

The same advice goes for Debian and the other distributions as well (although of course Linux doesn't have UVM yet). It would be a serious mistake to put in that much work just for 3.3 itself, although the work isn't wasted because after getting everything working on 3.3, switching to 3.4 should be (technically) pretty easy.