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

lolcompilers

[Anonymous Coward]

pre-javaScript relics

And showing every bit of its age too, apparently

[InterruptDescriptorT]

I love GCC, don't get me wrong, but it seems to me from the research I've done that it's been left in the dust by Intel's and even Microsoft's compilers, which do a far better job at generating optimized code, especially for x86/x64. I have an application where I'd love to use GCC rather than a horrible vendor-specific C/C++ compiler to generate some ARM firmware, but I'm getting a lot of resistance due to its perceived poor/bloated code generation.

Can anyone confirm or deny this and make me at least able to justify GCC as a possible option again?

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

[beelsebob]

It's not just been left in the dust by Intel and MS's – it's also been left in the dust by Apple's (now BSDed) clang. It runs faster, produces faster code, produces better error messages, is more amenable for using parts in other tools, has a brilliant static analysis tool that comes with it, ...

Re:Thanks gcc!

[TheRaven64]

They still do this with GCC. Because of the poor layering, getting a new target often requires hacking up various parts of the middle. Their goal is a working compiler, so they just do the minimum required to get their target working, at the expense of breaking others. These changes won't get incorporated into mainline GCC, so you're stuck with a GCC fork that's going to be unmaintained pretty soon.

In contrast, LLVM back ends are modular and quite easy to write and, more importantly, don't need to touch any of the rest of the system. This is why ARM is now investing quite a lot in LLVM and companies like Qualcomm have seemingly permanent job adverts for anyone with LLVM experience.