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GCC Gets Its Own News Site

Posted by timothy on from the specialization-of-labor dept.

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."

3 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Serious question by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 3, Interesting
    VC covers them all, and produces code that is faster and more compact than gcc, and does so in less time than gcc takes.

    So I guess if anything ought to be posted on the new gcc news site, it ought to be how gcc is catching up to commerical alternatives (which, though not Free, are free for download).

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

  2. The future of GCC (LLVM?) by Qwavel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    First off, thanks to all the people who contributed to GCC.

    I think that version 3.4 for C++ was a very important release. It's great that there are now a series of compilers for Windows and Linux that are highly standards compliant and reasonably compatible with each other. I am referring to GCC and VC71 on Windows, and GCC and Intel on Linux.

    The decision of the GCC people to focus on correctness and standards compliance before optimization was correct in my opinion.

    On the other hand, I'm concerned that the most exciting ideas from last years GCC conference do not appear to be on the GCC roadmap, and are not mentioned in the proceedings of this years conference (pls correct me if I'm wrong).
    http://people.redhat.com/lockhart/.gcc04/ MasterGCC -2side.pdf

    The ideas I'm referring to are LLVM and the compile server. I know that development on LLVM is progressing well, but I haven't heard anymore about it becoming part of GCC. The 'compile server' idea involved starting a single process that managed the compilation of all the translation units in a module, rather than running GCC once for each TU.

    I realize these are big changes - are they on the horizon for 4.0?

  3. Re:Serious question by cimetmc · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Since GCC 3, the GCC developers have a very strong tendancy to strictly adhere to standards and even to deprecate or remove non standard GCC extensions, especially those that become problematic because they syntactically interfere with newer C99 features. What makes the kernel non portable accross compilers is more the stuff like inline assembly or directives that control where some pieces of code are located in memory. This kind of stuff is inherently non portable, but there is little one can do about it. Note that given GCC is the standard compiler for the Linux platform, Intel has gone so far as to add those GCC extensions that are necessary to compile the kernel. With just a minimum number of patches, icc thus manages to compile the linux kernel.