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GCC 4.1 Released
Luineancaion writes "Looks like GCC 4.1 has been released. From what I know this includes the GNU Classpath merge and means that Azureus can now be used in a 100% Free-Software system. Thanks to everyone that worked on it, and keep up the good work!"
Google to the rescue.
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.1/changes.html
Claude Angers
I'm not sure what gave the person who submitted the story, or the editor who posted the story, the idea that 4.1 was released, but it isn't. In fact, it was just branched less than a week ago. We haven't even put out an RC yet! Really, it's not out. When it is, you will see something sent to gcc-announce
You're making too much of this. Between 4.0 and 4.1 isn't that big-a change. The only reason why it took so long for many distros to move between 3.3 and 3.4/4.0 was the change in the binary interface between the compilers. In other words a program compiled with 4.0 couldn't link to a library compiled with 3.3. There isn't this restriction between 4.0 and 4.1 so there's no reason why it can't go into the repositories straight after testing.
GCC is an impressive piece of software - either considered asopen source or in general. A lot of people preffer more "serious" C/C++ compilers, like Intels', but it's a remarkably good compiler by itself, very fast, produces stable and well optimized code AND it is available for every platform you could dream of developing on. Ah, and constantly improving support for other languages (specially Java) is a nice perk aswell :)
It's safe to say that if we have a healthy OSS community, is because of the great developing tools available on OSS platforms. GCC is a strong contender for that crown, IMHO.
GCC 4.1.0 is not yet out as far as I know. This story is misleading. Just because the site lists 4.1.0 on the front does not mean it is out. Notice that it doesn't have a release date on it.
Changelog here
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.1/changes.html
Hey, I like this: "GCC can now emit code for protecting applications from stack-smashing attacks. The protection is realized by buffer overflow detection and reordering of stack variables to avoid pointer corruption"
The caching JIT has been available since 3.4, but is disabled by default. To turn it on, you'll need to add these switches to your gij command line:
-Dgnu.gcj.jit.compiler=/usr/bin/gcj -Dgnu.gcj.jit.cachedir=/tmp -Dgnu.gcj.jit.options=-O2
In practice, this is not a great help because gij and gcj are so slow. You may be able to get much better results compiling directly from Java source to machine code, and then prelinking the resulting executables and shared objects to reduce startup time.
GCC 4.1 has not been released yet.
A modified version of Classpath has been included with GCJ since 3.2.
Azureus may start in GIJ 4.0, but won't work properly because it relies on parts of the Sun JDK which aren't completely implemented yet in GCJ.
First of all, it is true that if one only goes by the definition of open source then the GNU compiler collection does fulfill all the conditions of that definition. GCC also fulfills the Free software definition. Since this software package seems to satisfy both we must therefore look at some other facts to see which group this software appropriately belongs to.
Who started writing it and for what reason?
Richard Stallman did so that we could have more freedom. Not because he thought it simply had more technical merit to publish the code. So GCC would not exist if it were not for the philosophical base upon which it was started continues to rely on. GCC was not started because of any open source philosophy.
What about the name of the software package?
Humm, it appears to have the GNU name right at the beginning. I thus deduce that it is strongly involved with the Free software movement.
In the GCC mission statement it says that GCC is not only a Free software project, but more importanly that one of the main goals is Supporting the goals of the GNU project, as defined by the FSF. Not to mention that the copyright of GCC are kept by the Free Software Foundation.
You can make that group as broad as you want or as narrow as you want, but there is a happy medium where the label is non-offensive and clear to any and all that hear it .
First of all, when talking about open source software you are referring to all software that fulfills the open source definition. That is just as specific and narrow as Free software and the free software definition.
Regarding the non-offensive jib. There is absolutely nothing offensive about free software nor is there anything offensive about open source. Although I feel all warm inside whenever I hear about someone spending their lives work in defending and increasing my freedom in a non-violent manner.
Regarding the clarity of "Free software", that is something which is only a problem in the english speaking world. In most other languages the word for freed(dom) and the word for free(of charge) are different.
Open source is not quite as clear to a non insider of the computer idustry. Freedom is something generally a lot more meaningful then "open source(code)", since most people have no idea what source code is nor how it can be more open or closed but do have some grasp of the meaning of freedom. Many people have certainly heard of open source in the media and such but infer no real meaning from it, except perhaps that it "makes your computer go faster or something" (this is something which I have heard many people say when asked about what open source means to them). If you were to ask those same people if they cared about their freedom, I think you would get at least a little more intelligible answers. Going too narrow may provide more information but at a loss of understanding to your audience.
How can you fail to put across your meaning if you are being as specific, lengtly and clear about your explinations as possible?! This is just nonsense.
RMS is in error here, but not because he thinks that software designated Free Software ought not be referred to as Open Source software, but because he thinks that anyone cares.
Well, the government of my country seemed to care enough for the minestry of education to both endorse his visit and our local LUG (with money and other resources) and to hold a special ministry session were they listened to his recommendations and from that wrote a
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
> I see them more as a symbiosis.
>
> Where would GCC be without Linux?
> Where would Linux be without GCC?
Well, I was using gcc way before Linux hit the streets. Gcc and the GNU tools were the compiler and utility package that you could run on a bunch of systems without much tweaking of your makefiles. The same input created a binary with the same behaviour. So, I think gcc would be alive and well without Linux. On the other hand, Linux was possible because of the availibility of the GNU tools. So, RMS actually has a point in insisting that it should be called GNU/Linux. As soon as you log in, you probably run bash (GNU), when you type rm, ls, cc, make and so on, it is likely that you invoke a GNU tool or even if not, whatever you start will quicly suck in the C library (GNU).
Zoltan
Eh, GCC was the default compiler for several platforms before Linux existed, and was the prefered compiler for cross-compilation to embedded platforms, and for software that ran on a wide range of platforms. It was also the preferred compiler for ANSI C (GCC got support for ANSI C very early).
In other words, GCC would be exactly where it is today, had it not been for Linux.
The one thing that is correct is that the official gcc was growing stagnant. But that was due to the official maintainer, who was (and is, he still contribute to gcc) a great compiler engineer, but a poor free software project leader. The majority of the work was done by Cygnus Support, whose customers were mostly in the embedded arena. Cygnus then decided to open up development based on their own branch, under the name egcs (and with an understanding from FSF), in order to involve more people in the development. It became a huge sucess, and the egcs branch became the official FSF branch.
/. hate-object, ESR's, Cathedral and Bazaar paper), served as an inspiration to move away from the traditional relatively closed FSF style of maintainership.
.com boom, and showed their first profit right after, most of their listed "wins" were in the old Cygnus business area). But the maintainer is from CodeSourcery, who does contract compiler work in a rather wide area. And the main contributor may, somewhat ironically, be Apple, it is certainly their email adress I see most on the developer list. Other than that, HP, IBM and Intel contribute a lot.
The biggest contribution from Linux may be that Linux (together with the favorite
Today, SUSE makes good contributions. So does Red Hat, although it is hard to see which part of those contributions come from the old Cygnus part of the company (Red Hat bought Cygnus during the