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GCC 2.95 Released

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the changes-anyone? dept.

sparky writes "The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 2.95 is available ."> here [Ed: Please use a mirror]. This is the first release of GCC since the EGCS steering committee took over, and a major step on the way to GCC 3.0. " Interesting to see we have a new ANC (acronym name change).

3 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. GCC and Ritchie's compilers by ajs · · Score: 4

    It's great to see the full span of history, here. The previous article was Ritchie releaseing code for the first C compilers and this one is GCC 2.95 which is the culmination of at least 15 years of work on the part of Stallman, FSF, Cygnus and probably tens of thousands of volunteers. For those who are looking to advocate Open Source within their companies, or just see for yourself what this "new" paradigm can produce, please read the GCC source! It's some of the best code I've ever seen (though I admit it has it's... blemishes). The way it achives platform neutrality while producing highly platform-optimizied code is genius, and you can really feel its roots (the intermediate language is a compromise between Stallman's love for LISP and a desire to keep compilation fast and efficient). This is all without going into the fact that there are now front-ends for every major programming language with the exception of the purely interpreted ones (Perl, Python, TCL, etc).

    Currently, as far as I am aware, this is the finest compiler on the face of the Earth, and I dare someone to prove it wrong. There are compilers that produce faster code for a specific platform, and there are compilers for languages that GCC has never heard of, but GCC wins the all-around best technology (IMHO) for producing native instructions from your pet language. It's the one tool which I feel justifies all of Stallman's quirkiness, and gives me faith in the future of Open Source.

    1. Re:GCC and Ritchie's compilers by JoeBuck · · Score: 4

      As a member of the gcc/egcs steering committee, I would be very happy if, in fact, GCC were "the finest compiler on the face of the earth". It isn't. It is the most widely ported compiler, and it's decent enough, but many other compilers beat it for code quality.

      gcc 2.95 still isn't that great on Intel-compatible processors. The good news is that we finally have a new IA32 back end, produced by Cygnus under contract, that has been donated; we'll finally have enough accuracy to do instruction selection and scheduling properly. It will be in gcc 2.96 (or whatever we call it). Until then, pgcc will be better (I believe that the new back end beats pgcc at least most of the time).

  2. Kernel and GCC 2.95 by Kento · · Score: 5

    I was just reading the linux kernel mailing list (which i *just* resubscribed to) and apparently, the kernel won't compile correctly with gcc 2.95. Here's an excerpt:

    The linux kernel violates certain aliasing
    rules specified in the ANSI/ISO
    standard. Starting with GCC 2.95, the gcc
    optimizer by default relies on these
    rules to produce more efficient code and thus
    will produce malfunctioning
    kernels. To work around this
    problem, the flag -fno-strict-aliasing must be
    added to the CFLAGS variable in
    the main kernel Makefile.

    Disclaimer: I haven't downloaded the new compiler and so I haven't tried it yet, but keep this in mind when you upgrade gcc.