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egcs to become gcc
An anonymous reader sent us this page (its in
german! Use babelfish) which says that
EGCS has been accepted as the official compiler of the GNU Project
by RMS. I've seen a lot of confirmation of this, but nothing
official on the GNU website.
Anyway, I'm glad to see it. EGCS is a great compiler- it'll
be even cooler once its simply GCC! Update: 04/21 01:26 by J : The GNU website has been updated. The
EGCS steering committee has been renamed, and is now officially in charge of GCC.
They are basically the same system (backend compiler engine with frontends for C, C++, Objective-C, F77 etc). EGCS was started by taking the current version of GCC and forking it with a 'bazaar' rather than 'cathedral' model. As a result it's progressed a lot faster in both stability and features.
The reason you hear a lot about EGCS in relation to C++ is that it's a much better and more modern C++ compiler than GCC.
-Doug
Retirement in sight for gcc
The free GNU C/C++ compiler has a successor. The development of the replacement has been dragging along for quite some time now. The head of the GNU project Richard Stallman has now decided that, in the future, egcs shall be the official copiler of the GNU project.
The developers are trying to reintegrate the different improvements on gcc. Among these are the Fortran Frontend g77 and pgcc, which is optimized for the Pentium instruction set. More information at http://egcs.cygnus.com/
As one of the co-maintainers of the Debian EGCS packages, I'm extremely happy about this. I've found the EGCS developers quite responsive about bug reports, and often found bugs in release versions to be fixed in snapshots already.
What this meant in practice, was that EGCS advanced rapidly, and has succeeded in reintegrating most of the separate GCC development communities (C++, Ada, Fortran, Pascal, Pentium optimisations) with major improvements (Haifa scheduler, integrated testsuite, much closer to C++ standard).
English:
/. (ck/iX)
Separation for GCC in view The free GNU C/C++ compiler GCC got a successor. The development of the compiler/translator had sluggishly run already for some time. GNU boss Richard Stallman decided now that egcs in the future the official compiler of the GNU project will be. Its developers try to integrate different advancements of the GCC again into a product.
In addition among other things FORTRAN-FRONT-ENDS g77 belongs and particularly on Pentium operations optimized pgcc. closer information gives it with
http://egcs.cygnus.com
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Can anyone sum up the differences between egcs and gcc and explain why they haven't been combined up until now? I believe egcs is Enhanced GNU Compiler Suite and I think it's the C++ version of gcc. At least I usually see it mentioned in association with C++ programs although I've never used egcs.
Does gcc do things that egcs doesn't, or is it just inertia that keeps people using gcc? In theory you don't need a C compiler, right? A C++ compiler ought to be able to compile all your C source code.
This is very encouraging - it goes against the common criticism of open-source software which states that such projects often fragment. Once the remaining features from PGCC are folded into egcs/gcc we'll have one superb compiler.
Chris Wareham
No final decision has been made as to whether the planned egcs 1.2 will come out as egcs 1.2 or gcc 3.0 or gcc some other number.
Also, June is not a promise: it will come out when it is ready.
As a member of the egcs steering committee, which will become the gcc steering commitee, I can confirm that yes, the merger is official ... sometime in the near future there will be a gcc 3.0 from the egcs code base. The steering committee has been talking to RMS about doing this for months now; at times it's been contentious but now that we understand each other better, things are going much better.
The important thing to understand is that when we started egcs, this is what we were planning all along (well, OK, what some of us were planning). We wanted to change the way gcc worked, not just create a variant. That's why assignments always went to the FSF, why GNU coding style is rigorously followed.
Technically, egcs/gcc will run the same way as before. Since we are now fully GNU, we'll be making some minor changes to reflect that, but we've been doing them gradually in the past few months anyway so nothing that significant will change. Jeff Law remains the release manager; a number of other people have CVS write access; the steering committee handles the "political" and other nontechnical stuff and "hires" the release manager.
egcs/gcc is at this point considerably more bazaar-like than the Linux kernel in that many more people have the ability to get something into the official code (for Linux, only Linus can do that). Jeff Law decides what goes in the release, but he delegates major areas to other maintainers.
The reason for the delay in the announcement is that we were waiting for RMS to announce it (he sent a message to the gnu.*.announce lists), but someone cracked an important FSF machine and did an rm -rf / command. It was noticed and someone powered off the machine, but it appears that this machine hosted the GNU mailing lists, if I understand correctly, so there's nothing on gnu.announce. I don't know why there's still nothing on www.gnu.org (which was not cracked). Why do people do things like this?
I've seen several people seem to be confused here thinking that the merger of egcs and gcc means having a Pentium-optimized gcc as the standard C compiler. This is not the case. As of yesterday, there were a number of compilers out there:
gcc-2.7.2.x: Required for Linux 2.0.x kernel builds due to bugs in the kernel code, and possibly more stable for some 2.2.x kernels, though it is less clear whether that is due to the kernel or the other compilers. Though it includes various front ends, generally it is only used for C anymore.
gcc-2.8.x: A major upgrade to gcc; the "standard" gcc. Like always, includes C, C++, and other front ends.
egcs-1.1.2: The actively-developed gcc spinoff. This is generally regarded as being superior for C++ and every bit as good for C as gcc-2.8. For most people, this is a total replacement for gcc-2.8.
pgcc-1.1.x: This is an egcs spinoff, with active development on various compiler optimizations, particularly emphasising Pentium-specific improvements. Because optimization is about as deep into the arcane black arts of compilers as you can get, it is not surprising that pgcc is believed to be less stable than egcs. However, some of the more solid optimizations have been integrated into egcs. Think of it as the "Really Experimental EGCS."
So the upshot of all this is that we can scratch gcc-2.8 from the above list soon. My guess is that the FSF will release a new gcc-2.8 identical to the latest egcs, and egcs will either continue development separately from gcc (with occasional releases of gcc based on the egcs updates), or that egcs will simply be renamed gcc.
We will still need 2.7.2.x for anyone keeping up with 2.0.x kernels. We still might want pgcc for optimizing x86 code. We still want egcs/gcc for compiling things when we don't trust pgcc.
Can anyone sum up the differences between egcs and gcc and explain why they haven't been combined up until now?
Here is a list of new features in egcs 1.1:
Link
Canadian is the unusal case where the build platform, host platform and target platform are all different. e.g. Building a 68k compiler that will run on Sparc on an x86 box.