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!"

Comments

Know and love GCC

[JoeShmoe950]

As a developer, I love GCC. Its great, easy, and best of all free. GCC is probably one of the most benifical open source projects around, more important even than linux.

Re:Know and love GCC

[DrXym]

In other words, GCC would be exactly where it is today, had it not been for Linux.

I doubt that. GCC was seriously stagnated way before 2.95/3.0 (hence the reason egcs appeared for a while) and was no match at all compared to various commercial compilers. Linux was about the only popular OS which *needed* a modern gcc and thus most of the development came from Linux stakeholders - Red Hat etc. Without Linux I fully expect that the compiler would be an also-ran by now, along with most commercial Unices.

Java status?

[harmonica]

From the story: From what I know this includes the GNU Classpath merge and means that Azureus can now be used in a 100% Free-Software system.

Sounds interesting. Is there any ChangeLog to read? I browsed the gcc and the gcj pages, but I couldn't find anything.

Changelog?

[Theovon]

No mention of a changelog? If you're going to announce something, it sure would be nice to have a link to a page that explains some interesting stuff about what's new in it. I've tried looking at their wiki, but its 'news' section and its stuff on 4.1 hasn't been updated since like March.

Sense and portability

[noz]

I was always angry with Sun touting Java(R)(TM)*** as portable when run-time environments were made available for only a small (albeit popular) set of architecture/operating system pairs. My Alpha running Debian at home and my Alpha running FreeBSD at work were left cold, lonely, and wanting Java; running a subset of Java applications with free software partial implementations. This is a triumph for FOSS.

I'm thinking of contributing to GCC...

[TwoBit]

I love GCC, but I lament that its ability to do inlining is rather bad.
I'm wondering how hard it would be join the project and work on rectifying this.

Re:Home depot

[Billly Gates]

I saw some benchmarks a few months ago that closes the gap in performance in c/c++ performance with gcc/g++ 4.0 and the Intel compilers.

Intel wrote them when gcc2.95 was still out and c++ performance was not that good nor was it truly modern ansi compliant by the iso. For example things like the STL were merely emulated and performance for non x86 cpu's was behind too.

With gcc3.x and now gcc4.x its fully caught up in almost all area's. Its nice now to have a nice c/c++ compiler for the alpha and mips processors that produce fast code.

I wonder if the rise of Linux and Free software is what made the compilers catch up?

By the way the Intel compiler is still the way to go for Fortran.

Re:C and Objective-C

[mark-t]

Hmmm... the textbook I used in the compiler course I took way back in the olden days said that recursive descent compilers were, in general, slower and in general larger than state-based ones.

Mind you, the book is over 20 years old now.

Re:Home depot

[macshit]

As for the compiler itself, yes, it's not the best of the bunch, but that doesn't mean it's any bad either (quite the opposite!). Intels' compiler, for example, still beats it for performance (at least the last few times i tried it), but i could live happily with GCC alone.

I've spent quite a bit of time hacking on gcc, and I'd say my biggest complaint is that a lot of the gcc code really sucks. It's chock full of gigantic impossible-to-understand chunks of code -- few comments, huge numbers of global variables, an "enumerate every case I could think of with 25 page if-statements" coding style, vast numbers of unwritten assumptions about the way your processor works. That it works at all, never mind as well as it does, is a testament to the dedication of gcc hackers.

I think a lot of this is historic, and the newer parts of the compiler are much better (and so the overall code quality is slowly improving as old code gets replaced), but gcc can still be a real pain to work on. If you're trying to port to an architecture that differs in some way from "typical" architectures, be prepared for misery.