GCC Turns 25

eldavojohn writes "With the release of GCC 4.7.0, the venerable and stalwart constant that is the GNU Compiler Collection turns twenty five. More ISO standards and architectures supported with this release and surely more memories to come from the compiler that seems to have always been."

Comments

Re:lolcompilers

[multiben]

You must be a high quality programmer.

Thanks gcc!

[stox]

You youngin' have no idea of what kind of crap for compilers we had to put up with until gcc.

25 years of compilation with gcc!

Re:Thanks gcc!

[msclrhd]

Having competing products (browsers, compilers, operating systems, ...) help keep those products from stagnating and help push all involved products to improving. It also helps prevent people being reliant on specific compiler/browser/office suite behaviour. GCC is not a "crap compiler", just like Firefox is not a "crap browser". That is not saying that GCC is issue free, nor that it has improved in part as a result from LLVM/Clang. Likewise, LLVM/Clang is not the panacea of compilers.

Competition on a level playing field is a good thing.

Re:Thanks gcc!

[samkass]

The guy in that second link doesn't sound very pissed off. And clang definitely has WAY better error messages and analysis/refactoring available to it. As for the codegen, it beat GCC by a wide margin when it first came around, but GCC seems to have surpassed it again in more recent versions.

But the key for any commercial entity is that clang beats the pants off any GPLv2-licensed compiler, and GPLv3-licensed code is pretty much irrelevant to most applications. So GCC is doing a great job for the insulated linux world, and hopefully clang can catch back up to offer the rest of us a better choice.

Re:Thanks gcc!

[KiloByte]

How exactly GPLv3 on the _compiler_ stops you from doing anything? It has only one effect: ensures the toolchain stays usable for everyone.

Re:Thanks gcc!

[Anonymous Coward]

Richard Stallman would point out how he has been talking about the dangers of secure boot and software patents for years, and how Theo just now figured out that those things might be a problem. Then we would watch two grown men stare and gleer at each other.

Re:Thanks gcc!

[drinkypoo]

Imagine that your favorite text editor uses Clang's own parser to generate its syntax highlighting and check for errors as you type. With the GPL, your editor would likely have to be released under the GPL.

If your editor is modular and you include a plug-in for this function, then only the plug-in needs to be GPL'd. Your program doesn't, because it doesn't depend on it to function, it only adds additional functionality.

Re:And showing every bit of its age too, apparentl

[ichthus]

Are you serious? You're a firmware engineer and you can't figure out what compiler to use. Further, you're developing for ARM and you think that Microsoft or Intel may be the best option?
<br><br>
NXP recommends GCC (Code Red IDE which is Eclipse-based), and ST recommends Keil, for their ARM micros. Just FYI.
<br><br>
Good luck on your school project.

Re:And showing every bit of its age too, apparentl

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel and Microsoft compilers are generally considered better than GCC for IA32 and x86_64, but that's mostly because those are the only platforms those compilers need to target (Microsoft care about ARM now, but I don't know how well MSVCC compares to GCC for any given ARM target). Architecture specific compilers will always be able to take crazy shortcuts in the optimiser and generator. GCC has to jump through all sorts of hoops between the front end and the back end, because the front end can't make any assumptions about the back end.

Re:And showing every bit of its age too, apparentl

[Tetsujin]

Well, one thing that's happened to me an awful lot is that GCC seems to generate smaller *and* faster code when using -Os rather than -O3. That it'd be smaller was no surprise to me, but the speed-up was. (For reference, I'm using an IA32 2 GHz CPU with 1.5 GB of RAM.)

Fewer cache misses, maybe?

Thank you gnu

[Ada_Rules]

I remember the first time I built gcc in college on an decstation (probably around 1990) I was thrilled to have a free compiler with source code. It almost seemed like magic. Several years later when the GNAT project started and promised to bring Ada programming to GCC I was even happier but I never really expected it would turn into the high quality Ada compiler that we have today. While HURD never really worked out, the GCC project alone (never mind the vast quantity of other software covered by the GPL) has been transformational and I think many of the younger generation take the existence of this stuff for granted.

Now, get off my lawn.

Re:It's hard work being a JavaScript Rockstar.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is has been intentional been feature ridden....

WTF?

I think it's a non-proofread approximation of saying "Javascript has lots of language features, many of which are redundant". The implication being that the language is bigger than it needs to be and so is more complex and difficult to read than it should be.

All ugly languages have this problem, the lack of orthogonality results in massive numbers of anti-patterns (see Perl as the classic default example, C++ is another).

Re:Microsoft bought and rebranded Lattice C.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, come on. I despise Microsoft as much, or more, than anyone here. But how does freely selling something for an agreed-on price of $75K make SCP a victim, no matter what Microsoft may have done with their purchase subsequently?

If I sell my house for $200K, and the buyer subsequently resells it some time later for $300K, can I be a victim too? Is no one an adult any more, capable of making decisions and accepting the consequences, for better or worse? Let's grow up, shall we?