GCC 4.0 Preview

Reducer2001 writes "News.com is running a story previewing GCC 4.0. A quote from the article says, '(included will be) technology to compile programs written in Fortran 95, an updated version of a decades-old programming language still popular for scientific and technical tasks, Henderson said. And software written in the C++ programming language should run faster--"shockingly better" in a few cases.'"

Comments

Mudflap

[SteelV]

"GCC 4.0 also introduces a security feature called Mudflap, which adds extra features to the compiled program that check for a class of vulnerabilities called buffer overruns, Mitchell said. Mudflap slows a program's performance, so it's expected to be used chiefly in test versions, then switched off for finished products." - from the article

I really love this feature, it will probably cut down on a great deal of problems. My only concern is that some devs will think running it all the time is OK (read: "Mudflap slows a program's performance"), so hopefully that's not the case.

More detailed information on the mudflap system can be found here.

Re:Mudflap

[idlake]

C doesn't have a screwed up pointer semantics. It is perfect for what it does. You probably just don't understand it. Where are you getting the 3 to 5 factor? Anything to back that up? And the few percent is from what language?

I have been using C since 1980. I have seen dozens of attempts to fix C semantics since then. I published some papers on it myself. It can't be done efficiently. The best you can do is something like Mudflap, Purify, Cyclone, or Valgrind.

Where does the factor of 3-5 come from? From the Mudflap paper on the Mudflap web site--it has benchmarks.

Where do the "few percent overhead" come from? From comparing the performance of Pascal, Java, and Eiffel code compiled with safety on and off.

And you know what the real kicker is? Not only do C pointer semantics make it impossible to generate efficient runtime safety checks, they even inhibit important optimizations when no safety features are enabled. And because C programmers then have to jump through all sorts of hoops to achieve some kind of safety in the midst of this chaos, the software ends up being bloated, too. So, C is not only bad for efficient safe code, it is bad for efficient code of any form.

I am getting sick when C-hating posts like this one get modded up. Seems to be happening all the time lately.

I'm getting sick of the fact that ignorant fools like you have been holding back progress in software systems for a quarter of a century. It's even more annoying that you try to portray your ignorance and inexperience as some kind of principled stance. C was good for what it was 30 years ago: an on-board compiler for writing small, low-level programs on machines with very limited memory. C made a decent PDP-11 compiler for V7 UNIX, and it was usable on CP/M and MS-DOS. I have fond memories of it in those environments.

I'm starting to meta-mod again.

You do that. If you join forces with enough other idiots, you will probably be able to condemn us to another quarter century of bad pointers, buffer overruns, and bloat.

and how many times...

[Zapman]

And how many times will they break ABI, API and library compatability in THIS major release? Count stands at 4 for the 3 series, maybe higher.

The biggest challenge with Binary compatability across Linux distros is the GCC release (followed by the glibc releases, who live in the same ivory tower). I realize that things have to change, but I wish that they would not break compat between versions quite so often...

I'd really like to be able to take a binary between versions, and it just work.

This is one area where Sun rocks. Any binary from any solaris2 build will just work on any later version. With some libraries, you can go back to the SunOS days (4.1.4, 4.1.3UL, etc). That's 15 years or so.

Favorite quote from the article

[devphil]

It's not too much of a stretch to say GCC is as central an enabler to the free and open-source programming movements as a free press is to democracy.