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GCC 4.8.0 Release Marks Completion of C++ Migration
hypnosec writes "GCC 4.8.0 has been released (download), and with it, the developers of the GNU Compiler Collection have switched to C++ as the implementation language, a project the developers have been working for years. Licensed under the GPLv3 or later, version 4.8.0 of the GCC not only brings with it performance improvements but also adds memory error detector AddressSanitizer, and race condition detection tool the ThreadSanitizer. Developers wanting to build their own version of GCC should have at their disposal a C++ compiler that understands C++ 2003."
For not using the word "dog food" in the summary.
This should be in the Debian repositories by the end of the decade.
How was the first compiler compiled?
With an assembler. (of course, real men didn't need an assembler, they toggled in the hexadecimal opcodes directly in hex, using a hickory switch and a quart of whiskey)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
It wasn't. It was written in assembly language and was converted into machine code by an assembler.
It is like everything in modern life... how do you build a lathe without a lathe? Or a generator without electricity? It would take a thousand years to start from nothing and get back to where we are now.
You make it sound so easy.
You need to compile this compiler with a compiler which begs the question....
Sigh. It raises the question. To "beg the question" means something completely different. Here is a simple rule of thumb of when that phrase should be used: never.
How was the first compiler compiled?
The first compilers (Fortran and Lisp) were written in assembler. Later compilers were written in Lisp or Fortran.
New languages can be bootstrapped by first implementing a sufficient subset, and then expanding it. Ken Thompson explains this process (and how to subvert the process) in his Turing Award lecture on Trusting Trust.
Enough people use the term "beg the question" this way that I've just gotten used to it by now. It doesn't bother me anymore. It's over, man. The war is lost. It's in common use now. Rewire the part of your brain that gets annoyed by it. You will be happier in the long run.
From the changelog: "A new general optimization level, -Og, has been introduced. It addresses the need for fast compilation and a superior debugging experience while providing a reasonable level of runtime performance. Overall experience for development should be better than the default optimization level -O0."
This actually sounds really attractive to me... I'll have to try it out.
Hexadecimal? You kids and your newfangled contraptions. Back in my day, we had to use BINARY, and we were always running out of 1's so we had to take the 0's to the blacksmith and have them cut down and straightened before we could use them.
Sigh. It raises the question. To "beg the question" means something completely different. Here is a simple rule of thumb of when that phrase should be used: never.
"Beg" is just (in the context of questions) an old-fashioned word for 'ask'.
The problem is people use it to mean
a) an answer that merely restates the question (asking the same question a second time)
or
b) an answer that is incomplete without the answer to an immediate follow-up question (providing a deficient answer that merely raises a trivially new question without having provided any useful information).
The ambiguity is annoying.
Though not as much as other people overreacting to it.
Could we? Easily accessible deposits of any useful ore or fuel has been mined out ages ago. We could find ourselves in situation when we need resources to build tools, but without those tools we cannot access resources.
We should, but I don't think anyone has it well organized so far. This book is a good start though http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work
My supervisor held the hickory switch while I was manning the AN/UYK-7. Manfully.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Dave Gingery's books will get you a machine shop. That's a good start. (The first thing you build is a charcoal foundry. The second is a lathe.)
There are also blacksmithing groups where you can learn how to make things with iron. Presumably any post-apocalyptic society will have ample supplies of scrap iron to work with.
Now! Witness the power of this FULLY OPERATIONAL C++ Compiler! Muahahahahahaha! Erm... damn it... what's the flag for debug symbols again?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"Everything's easy when you know how to do it."--me
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
From Wikipedia:
> LLVM was originally intended to use GCC's front end, but GCC turned out to cause some problems for both the LLVM developers and Apple. GCC is a large and somewhat cumbersome system to develop; as one long-time GCC developer put it, "Trying to make the hippo dance is not really a lot of fun"[7] and a Google Summer of Code intern commented, "Reading GCC codebase has been a hard exercise for me. In fact it's the only project I know of that becomes more and more difficult as time passes."[8]
I'm just wondering, is this still the case? It sounds like they haven't changed much of anything, merely ported their codebase to C++. Am I correct in assuming that the above is still true or is this new version supposed to usher in a new era of GCC prosperity and usability on things other then the command line?
It is like everything in modern life... how do you build a lathe without a lathe? Or a generator without electricity? It would take a thousand years to start from nothing and get back to where we are now.
I think you vastly underestimate how much time and effort has been spent on pursuits that were futile or that were technically possible but nobody had discovered or knew the usefulness of doing. If the technology was already described to us we'd advance far more rapidly and planned. I'd expect a reboot to Amish levels in 100 years, the 1950s in another 50 and catching up to today 50 years after that at most.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Can it be used for non-OSS development and releases of compiled binaries to a customer?
It's not trolling, I really need to know (embedded dev here).
Puhlease. Octal. On the front panel of a PDP-8e.
Screw that. I'm going to continue pulling people up on this one irregardless.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Of course, all those pokes in the back of Compute! magazine were really just hand-converted machine instructions to be stuffed into specific areas of memory, but I didn't realize that at the time. I forget exactly when I finally made that association. I think it was during that assembly class; I was like "Oh, the number is just an opcode! Derp!" I probably could have squeezed a lot more interesting stuff out of my first computer (A TI 99/4A) if I'd know that at the time.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Yes it has been mined and is now conveniently placed on the surface instead of buried beneath it. If we hit some global catastrophe all that ore and raw material isn't going to vaporise (unless of course that was the catastrophe). If we have to melt down some sky scrapers for ore so be it.
Building new GCCs could be painful for a lot of people, probably have to build earlier GCC compilers first just to be able to build the later version.
There is no need for that. You just use a cross compiler. You only need to bootstrap a language once.
And then when the operator comes looking for you to fix something, you can be all like "That aint my program! Shit doesn't even look like my code! A lot of dudes we're typing in all sorts of things there, go find one of them!"
Enough people use the term "beg the question" this way that I've just gotten used to it by now. It doesn't bother me anymore. It's over, man. The war is lost. It's in common use now.
The problem with that approach is that you lose an important idiom that doesn't have a good substitute.
So, no, some things in the language are worth preserving (at least until a suitable alternative is found).
Rewire the part of your brain that gets annoyed by it. You will be happier in the long run.
You can educate people about the beauty of the language without being annoyed.
You know what, English is my 3rd language. I only moved into an English-speaking country when I was in my 30s, and if I can appreciate its richness, I'm pretty sure that a native speaker can do so as well.
I think it's shorthand for "bugger the questioner", i.e. if someone asks you a question, you sodomize them. It's some sort of British thing, I guess.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Maybe more than you think :)
blows were landed, they both got tired, and now they're at the neighborhood watering hole
telling the story for the fourth time in increasingly slurred words
They're pretty equal. Some things compiled with GCC run better, others with CLang run better.
At this point (and I mean exactly this point, no comment for future potential,) it's mostly a matter of license, which is pretty much irrelivant for compilers since even the GPL's copyleft doesn't force you to go GPL to use their compiler.
To me it seems like the major motivation behind LLVM / Clang were to make a great open source compiler that wasn't GPL. They've succeeded, whether or not you agree with their intention is mostly politics.
Having competition is good in any case. I'm sure that while there are plenty of fanboys and zealots on each side, I wouldn't be surprised if the major players behind each compiler collection were pretty cordial with eachother.
clang is a lot faster and uses a huge amount less memory than GCC when running. for some projects this is rather important.
gcc has a lot of cross-build chains out there, and a lot of experienced users. but i have never seen a clang->arm cross chain.
clang++ is still using GNU libraries for C++ stuff.
clang is still a pain in the ass to compile, with unclear instructions, and a massive, huge compile time. gcc on the other hand is built by automated scripts quite frequently as part of, for example, cross-toolchain builds.
clang has vastly better error messages than gcc. this is increasingly important with the popularity of huge complex template libraries like boost, eigen, cgal, etc etc etc.
I remember seeing a pretty cool 8080 program to zero memory. It went something like:
LXI BC, 0000
LXI HL, 0009
LXI SP, 0008
PUSH BC
PCHL
HL, BC, and SP (the stack pointer) are all 16-bit registers, and the first three instructions occupy 0x0000-0x0008 in memory. PUSH BC is one byte at 0x0009, and PCHL (another one-byte instruction) sets the program counter to the value of HL; essentially it allows you to jump to the address contained in the HL register. The PUSH operation decremented the stack pointer before storing each of the bytes, so you would set the stack pointer to one higher than the highest address you wanted to overwrite. Because the 8080 was little-endian, address 0x0008 was the upper byte of the third instruction's numeric value - it was already zero (if it were big-endian you could just throw in a NOP to get it to align properly). The final PUSH operation - after the program had cycled through all of memory - wiped out the PUSH BC and PCHL operations, and the computer would go to all NOPs.
You need to compile this compiler with a compiler which begs the question....
Sigh. It raises the question. To "beg the question" means something completely different. Here is a simple rule of thumb of when that phrase should be used: never.
Nice comment.
Language evolves. This makes it nice and raises the question of what I mean by "nice comment" From http://etymonline.com/?term=nice,
nice (adj.) Look up nice at Dictionary.com
late 13c., "foolish, stupid, senseless," from Old French nice (12c.) "careless, clumsy; weak; poor, needy; simple, stupid, silly, foolish," from Latin nescius "ignorant, unaware," literally "not-knowing," from ne- "not" (see un-) + stem of scire "to know" (see science). "The sense development has been extraordinary, even for an adj." [Weekley] -- from "timid" (pre-1300); to "fussy, fastidious" (late 14c.); to "dainty, delicate" (c.1400); to "precise, careful" (1500s, preserved in such terms as a nice distinction and nice and early); to "agreeable, delightful" (1769); to "kind, thoughtful" (1830).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You find a compiler binary or cross-compile it on another system.
Need Mercedes parts ?
It's worth pointing out that GCC has been under GPLv3 since version 4.2.2 back in 2007. If it's a problem for anyone then it has been a problem for over five years now.
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-announce/2007/msg00004.html
Which begs the question of why you felt the need to post, thus bringing us full circle.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The problem with that approach is that you lose an important idiom that doesn't have a good substitute.
The idiom has already been lost, if only because communication is fundamentally about conveying concepts among those involved in discourse. The term "begs the question" at best is ambiguous now, but truly the original definition has been supplanted in common usage. Thus, using the idiom increases confusion in discourse (which is considered harmful).
Besides, "begs the question" (original idiom) doesn't mesh with the common usage of the word "beg" anymore, unlike how the "begs the question" (modern idiom) does. I argue that it was a poor choice of term in the first place.
Better to start promulgating the Latin term "petitio principii" for the fallacy, which should remain unambiguous forever. Or try "presumes the argument" or "presumes the point" instead, both of which are self-explanatory and are unlikely to become obsolete. Hell, the latter form has the same syllable count as "begs the question".