GCC Gets Its Own News Site

Marcel Cox writes "In an effort to promote the development of GCC, Mathieu Lacage created a GCC news page similar to the idea of Kernel Traffic. While we are on the topic of GCC, it might be worthwhile recalling two major events that occured during the last month: 1. The tree-ssa branch has been merged into mainline, which among others means the end of G77 and the addition of GFORTRAN, the new GNU Fortran 95 compiler. 2. The second annual GCC Developer's summit took place some 10 days ago in Ottawa."

Comments

Re:Serious question

[HalfFlat]

I suspect this is not so serious and more like a troll. But nonetheless.

Before any technical arguments, realise that a key difference between gcc and vc.net is that the former is copyleft and the latter is not. gcc runs on a large number of operating systems, and compiles a number of different languages (eg ada, fortran, c, objective c, c++).

As regards standards compliance, vc.net is not a c99 compiler; using c99 constructs which are not c++-ish will just fail under vc.net. vc.net is not an ada, fortran or objective-c compiler either.

Regarding news, the long sought-after fortran 95 compiler replacing the fortran 77 compiler is certainly newsworthy. In addition, a major architectural change -- the integreation of the tree-ssa branch -- heralds significant future optimization possibilities and is the culmination of two years (or more?) work. It's hard to think what would be more relevant to report.

Why would people care about gcc reports? Given that it is the standard compiler on a number of very popular operating systems, and that the quality of gcc is fundamental to the quality of compiled software on these platforms, and that similarly limitations of gcc in turn limit software on these platforms, it is obvious that gcc is a very important project. People couldn't turn to vc.net (or icc, or ...) for the basis of linux kernel and application development even if they wanted to.

Summary: gcc news is relevant to almost all free operating system developers and (indirectly) users, and this news is definitely gcc news.

Re:Serious question

[cimetmc]

The last time I checked, the free version of VC had optimization disabled. Has this situation changed?

This changed quite recently and Microsoft has now made the non crippled version of VC available for free download (command line online, not full IDE).

Re:I apologize if this is a stupid question, but..

[alex_tibbles]

read this and this.
SSA stands for Static Single Assignment.
Partly the work is about unifying parse-tree data structures throughout the compiler. "There is no single tree representation in GCC."