GCC Compiler Finally Supplanted by PCC?

Sunnz writes "The leaner, lighter, faster, and most importantly, BSD Licensed, Compiler PCC has been imported into OpenBSD's CVS and NetBSD's pkgsrc. The compiler is based on the original Portable C Compiler by S. C. Johnson, written in the late 70's. Even though much of the compiler has been rewritten, some of the basics still remain. It is currently not bug-free, but it compiles on x86 platform, and work is being done on it to take on GCC's job."

Comments

Re:Interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

It has less to do with the license and more to do with GCC's increasingly spotty support for some of the hardware platforms that NetBSD and OpenBSD run on. That and GCC internals are a maintenance nightmare, and its development process is getting even less commmunity-driven than it was before (which was never that much). Asking for a new compiler warning might take anywhere from a day to years just to get a response. The license is definitely gravy though.

The BSD license that PCC is under, I understand, is actually a problem even to the BSD folks: PCC is actually extremely old (it was originally written for the PDP11!) and apparently it still carries the advertising clause.

Re:"Nothing for you to see here" indeed...

[TheRaven64]

This has been on Undeadly for a few days now. There was a very informative post by Marc Espie (who maintains GCC on OpenBSD) explaining this.

This has been a long time coming. If you've ever looked at GCC code, you'll be familiar with the feeling of wanting to claw your eyes out (I had to for an article on the new Objective-C extensions *shudder*). I am somewhat surprised it's PCC not LLVM, but it makes sense. OpenBSD wants a C compiler in the base system, that can compile the base system and produces correct code. Support for C++, Objective-C, Java and Fortran would all be better off in ports. PCC is faster than GCC, smaller than GCC, more portable than GCC, easier to audit than GCC, and already compiles the OpenBSD userspace. I wouldn't be surprised if it replaces GCC in the OpenBSD base system soon. If it does, GCC (or maybe LLVM) will still probably be one of the first things I install from ports, but I'd still regard it as a good idea.

Re:Interesting...

[sunwukong]

I believe it was de Raadt that once mentioned he'd prefer a non-optimizing compiler that produced simple, bullet-proof, bug-free code, i.e., in terms of the OS and its base tools, he prefers correct to fast.

Re:The licence is just the top of the iceberg

[julesh]

Well that explains a lot. And here I was thinking that all modern compilers were designed correctly with a front-end and back-end. So much for academics.

Actually, the post you're replying to is total bollocks. GCC has had a clear divide between front and back end (not to mention a source-language independent middle layer for performing optimizations) since I first looked at it in about 1996. Each layer is hideously complex, but they are all there.

Re:We need to replace gcc ... why?

[evilviper]

A compiler that has been production-quality for over 15 years, compiles everything on every architecture, and has been continuously improved every minute of its existence needs to be replaced by ... Son of pcc? Because of a license?

You couldn't have gotten that statement any MORE WRONG if you had tried.

GCC's "production quality" is an on-again, off-again thing. Through most of v3.x it had too many bugs to count, and was inherently unreliable. It couldn't even compile ITSELF with the most basic optimizations or the resulting binary would generate incorrect code. Up until v4 it also misaligned stack variable. It had, and still has, MANY bugs. That GCC successfully compiles code at all is almost entirely due to it being so popular that everyone knows it, and works around its bugs without even thinking about it.

It has never had GOOD support for any other platforms than x86. Remember the RedHat GCC2.96 fiasco? They forked it because they needed it to support more platforms than it currently did. And even through v3.x the non-x86 ports of GCC had even more bugs than on x86, commonly falling apart if you attempt to use any optimizations. Now, they're DROPPING support for those platform entirely, which is a big problem for developers of operating systems for those platforms.

"Improved" is pretty vague. HURD has probably been "improved" for every minute of it's existence as well... Meanwhile the far younger ICC (Intel's compiler) beats the pants off of GCC without even trying.

What's more, GCC's "improvements" come at great cost. If you're a full-time developer, for the final release you want optimized code, but while developing, you want to compile and be able to test code frequently, and so as quickly as humanly possible. GCCv3+, even with all optimizations disabled, takes far, far longer to compile binaries than even older versions of GCC, and as it says, something like 10X slower than PCC.

The license issue is only incidental. These (and other) problems pushed them away from using GCC. Since they happen to be BSD developers, they'd prefer their work to be BSD licensed, and so it is.