GCC 3.3.1 Switch Coming Soon On NetBSD

Dan writes "Matthew Green says he is ready to switch sparc, sparc64, i386 & alpha ports to using GCC3.3.1 by default on NetBSD. He's uploaded 4 snapshots (one per port ;-), all cross compiled from i386-netbsd. However, there appears to be work involved with fixing approximately 193 broken packages, as reported by NetBSD's Jan Schaumann."

Comments

Re:I didnt know gcc3.3 was that mature

[__past__]

The biggest annoyance is that newer GCCs treat multiline string literals (i.e. strings with embeded newline characters as opposed to \n) as errors, instead of just issuing a warning. This is actually conforming behaviour, so packages should really be fixed upstream. Other than that, I never had any problems beyond simple warnings, but of course, YMMV.

Given that GCC got better and better in terms of ISO/ANSI C conformance, most problems are probably bugs that just didn't show up yet because they went with a matching GCC bug. So fixing them will only increase conformance, and hence portability to other compilers.

Re:I didnt know gcc3.3 was that mature

[JDizzy]

Yeah, this is the same issue we had in FreeBSD. Lots of little pendantic issues that used to be a warning become errors. This is, as you point out, an issues with interpritaion of the ANSI C standards. Lots of folks try to say their code works, and it doesn't work due to a bug in the new GCC, but that is just water under the bridge when they figure out that the world has changed, and they have to change their code with it.

Re:I didnt know gcc3.3 was that mature

[vesamies]

Inline functions in GCC2 are brainded. GCC3 makes this (and many more things I'm sure) work right. It's a shame they used that old compiler for so long, but I guess stabilizing a toolchain for 30+ (?) platforms is not that easy.

Re:It's dead, Jim

[bsd_usr]

That's probably because most BSD users have given up on the Slashdot BSD section. The Slashdot BSD section is overrun by trolls and FUD.

BSD is software which can be used freely by anyone. The only way for BSD to die is for people to completely stop using BSD code, but since BSD code is used in so many other software products it really won't ever die.

It's the immaturity of some of these Slahdot readers that have made the Slashdot BSD section go down the drain. But really, you know what's really sad. That these people have nothing esle to do in their poor excuse of a life that they turn to the BSD section to spout out FUD and repeat the "BSD is Dying" troll.

Why do I come here then? Because I too have nothing better to do. Actually, I guess maybe because sometimes through all the trolls and FUD there are some good posts.

Re:It's dead, Jim

[R.Caley]

And lets face it, most of the BSD headlines just aren't that interesting.

There is an old BSD curse: ``May you run an interesting operating system''.