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GCC 4.1 Released
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Nov 24, 2005 10:07 PM
from the compile-that-compiler dept.
from the compile-that-compiler dept.
Luineancaion writes "Looks like GCC 4.1 has been released. From what I know this includes the GNU Classpath merge and means that Azureus can now be used in a 100% Free-Software system. Thanks to everyone that worked on it, and keep up the good work!"
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But... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But... (Score:5, Funny)
You should have compiled it using 4.1. It's *much* faster.
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Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:But... (Score:3, Informative)
Home depot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Home depot (Score:5, Informative)
It's safe to say that if we have a healthy OSS community, is because of the great developing tools available on OSS platforms. GCC is a strong contender for that crown, IMHO.
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Re:Home depot (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel wrote them when gcc2.95 was still out and c++ performance was not that good nor was it truly modern ansi compliant by the iso. For example things like the STL were merely emulated and performance for non x86 cpu's was behind too.
With gcc3.x and now gcc4.x its fully caught up in almost all area's. Its nice now to have a nice c/c++ compiler for the alpha and mips processors that produce fast code.
I wonder if the rise of Linux and Free software is what made the compilers catch up?
By the way the Intel compiler is still the way to go for Fortran.
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Re:Home depot (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, gcc is a great compiler, but it is not as good as a commercial compiler like Intel's, or PathScale's, or the Portland groups' or another compiler that is designed for a specific platorm.
I use it by default on my Itanium, Alpha, x86, and SPARC systems, but when performance matters, I go for one that is better optimized.
The most grateful aspect of gcc to the world is that Linux would be impossible without it. And that in itself is enough. I learned C from using gcc, and like I said, I use it daily, but it is not the best performing compiler on the block. It is not uncommon to get up to 100% speedup using an optimized compiler for the platform over gcc, but for portability and familiarity of the compiler across platforms (which is its purpose), it is damn good. Especially when many vendors do not provide a C/C++ compiler for their OS without extra charge.
Thank you GNU and the gcc people.
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Re:Home depot (Score:5, Interesting)
I've spent quite a bit of time hacking on gcc, and I'd say my biggest complaint is that a lot of the gcc code really sucks. It's chock full of gigantic impossible-to-understand chunks of code -- few comments, huge numbers of global variables, an "enumerate every case I could think of with 25 page if-statements" coding style, vast numbers of unwritten assumptions about the way your processor works. That it works at all, never mind as well as it does, is a testament to the dedication of gcc hackers.
I think a lot of this is historic, and the newer parts of the compiler are much better (and so the overall code quality is slowly improving as old code gets replaced), but gcc can still be a real pain to work on. If you're trying to port to an architecture that differs in some way from "typical" architectures, be prepared for misery.
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Know and love GCC (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Know and love GCC (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Know and love GCC (Score:3, Informative)
>
> Where would GCC be without Linux?
> Where would Linux be without GCC?
Well, I was using gcc way before Linux hit the streets. Gcc and the GNU tools were the compiler and utility package that you could run on a bunch of systems without much tweaking of your makefiles. The same input created a binary with the same behaviour. So, I think gcc would be alive and well without Linux. On the other hand, Linux was possible because of the availibility of the GNU tools. So
Re:Know and love GCC (Score:5, Informative)
In other words, GCC would be exactly where it is today, had it not been for Linux.
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Re:Know and love GCC (Score:5, Interesting)
I doubt that. GCC was seriously stagnated way before 2.95/3.0 (hence the reason egcs appeared for a while) and was no match at all compared to various commercial compilers. Linux was about the only popular OS which *needed* a modern gcc and thus most of the development came from Linux stakeholders - Red Hat etc. Without Linux I fully expect that the compiler would be an also-ran by now, along with most commercial Unices.
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egcs (Score:4, Informative)
The biggest contribution from Linux may be that Linux (together with the favorite
Today, SUSE makes good contributions. So does Red Hat, although it is hard to see which part of those contributions come from the old Cygnus part of the company (Red Hat bought Cygnus during the
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Masters of understatement (Score:3, Insightful)
I am interested in how well it supports ARM5, seeing as how it was dropped as the recommended compiler for certain platforms.
Re:Masters of understatement (Score:5, Informative)
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on the java side (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:on the java side (Score:4, Informative)
-Dgnu.gcj.jit.compiler=/usr/bin/gcj -Dgnu.gcj.jit.cachedir=/tmp -Dgnu.gcj.jit.options=-O2
In practice, this is not a great help because gij and gcj are so slow. You may be able to get much better results compiling directly from Java source to machine code, and then prelinking the resulting executables and shared objects to reduce startup time.
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Java status? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds interesting. Is there any ChangeLog to read? I browsed the gcc and the gcj pages, but I couldn't find anything.
Re:Java status? (Score:4, Informative)
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.1/changes.html [gnu.org]
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GCC is the Key to Open Source's Success (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the day the first step in loading up a UNIX workstation with Open Source tools, was to go out and grab a limited precompiled version of GCC, then bootstrap compile an more suitable version, then go to town on compiling all the rest of the goodies that we couldn't live without. We did it so often that it became second nature to go through this process.
I salute you, makers and maintainers of GCC.
Re:GCC is the Key to Open Source's Success (Score:5, Insightful)
Please do take this in the supportive spirit in which it is intended. It's a letter from GCC's initial author, Richard Stallman [com.com] (also founder of the free software movement) to a CNet article author who referred to GCC as an "open source" programming tool.
Quoting from that letter:
Of course, this is not a letter from RMS to you or directly pertaining to your article. However, I thought that it was worth mentioning in case people want to tell their friends about the new GCC release. It seems that people who frequent /. go to some length to make sure that they describe Linus Torvalds' initial authorship of the Linux kernel in a manner according to his chosen movement. I thought that the same respect should be due to RMS.
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Re:GCC is the Key to Open Source's Success (Score:3, Insightful)
You would make the butt of jokes anyone who tried to demand that you call Roma tomatoes "Roma Tomatoes" every single time you referred to them instead of referring to them generally as tomatoes. It simply does not make any difference to anyone what you call them as long as you get the point across that the thing in question falls into a certain group. Yo
RMS wrote GCC to pursue software freedom. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:RMS wrote GCC to pursue software freedom. (Score:3, Informative)
Free software would be just as free by any other name, but the Open Source movement doesn't work to get people to recognize and cherish software freedom in its own right. RMS is asking people to recognize that his work was done in pursuit of software freedom, not the developmental goals of the Open Source movement. By the way, GCC was initially developed well before the Open Source Initiative existed.
Re:GCC is the Key to Open Source's Success (Score:4, Informative)
First of all, it is true that if one only goes by the definition of open source [opensource.org] then the GNU compiler collection does fulfill all the conditions of that definition. GCC also fulfills the Free software definition [gnu.org]. Since this software package seems to satisfy both we must therefore look at some other facts to see which group this software appropriately belongs to.
Who started writing it and for what reason?
Richard Stallman did so that we could have more freedom. Not because he thought it simply had more technical merit to publish the code. So GCC would not exist if it were not for the philosophical base upon which it was started continues to rely on. GCC was not started because of any open source philosophy.
What about the name of the software package?
Humm, it appears to have the GNU name right at the beginning. I thus deduce that it is strongly involved with the Free software movement.
In the GCC mission statement [gnu.org] it says that GCC is not only a Free software project, but more importanly that one of the main goals is Supporting the goals of the GNU project, as defined by the FSF. Not to mention that the copyright of GCC are kept by the Free Software Foundation.
You can make that group as broad as you want or as narrow as you want, but there is a happy medium where the label is non-offensive and clear to any and all that hear it .
First of all, when talking about open source software you are referring to all software that fulfills the open source definition. That is just as specific and narrow as Free software and the free software definition.
Regarding the non-offensive jib. There is absolutely nothing offensive about free software nor is there anything offensive about open source. Although I feel all warm inside whenever I hear about someone spending their lives work in defending and increasing my freedom in a non-violent manner.
Regarding the clarity of "Free software", that is something which is only a problem in the english speaking world. In most other languages the word for freed(dom) and the word for free(of charge) are different.
Open source is not quite as clear to a non insider of the computer idustry. Freedom is something generally a lot more meaningful then "open source(code)", since most people have no idea what source code is nor how it can be more open or closed but do have some grasp of the meaning of freedom. Many people have certainly heard of open source in the media and such but infer no real meaning from it, except perhaps that it "makes your computer go faster or something" (this is something which I have heard many people say when asked about what open source means to them). If you were to ask those same people if they cared about their freedom, I think you would get at least a little more intelligible answers. Going too narrow may provide more information but at a loss of understanding to your audience.
How can you fail to put across your meaning if you are being as specific, lengtly and clear about your explinations as possible?! This is just nonsense.
RMS is in error here, but not because he thinks that software designated Free Software ought not be referred to as Open Source software, but because he thinks that anyone cares.
Well, the government of my country seemed to care enough for the minestry of education to both endorse his visit and our local LUG [rglug.org] (with money and other resources) and to hold a special ministry session were they listened to his recommendations and from that wrote a
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More people than you imagine ... (Score:4, Insightful)
More people than you imagine do care.
I know I do, and I know lots of others do, too.
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Re:GCC is the Key to Open Source's Success (Score:4, Insightful)
Here is a list of contributors to GCC: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Contributors.ht
I would be quite annoyed with all this talk about initial authorship if I had just worked my butt of to get the current release out of the door.
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Azureus (Score:5, Funny)
Changelog? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Changelog? (Score:5, Informative)
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.1/changes.html [gnu.org]
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Re:But what about fixes? (Score:3, Informative)
That's good. (Score:5, Funny)
That's good for us, considering that the #1 use of Azureus is to pirate 100% commercial software.
Re:That's good. (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt that. It's probably movies and tv shows.
Re:That's good. (Score:3, Informative)
Sense and portability (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm thinking of contributing to GCC... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm wondering how hard it would be join the project and work on rectifying this.
Re:I'm thinking of contributing to GCC... (Score:5, Insightful)
The basics of compilers aren't difficult. 2nd year CS students can understand toy compilers. But gcc isn't a toy compiler, it's a real compiler in the real world dealing with a sometimes crazy language, and even crazier users. If you can write better optimizing code, prove it works, and it doesn't infringe on any patents, submit your code.
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A big thanks to the GCC team. (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks folks, and happy Thanksgiving.
Actually, it's not released yet (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Actually, it's not released yet (Score:3, Interesting)
The GCC home page [gnu.org] very clearly states "Current release series: GCC 4.1.0" while below it all the others say "Previous release series" and one at the bottom says "Active development (mainline)." That indicates as clearly as can be which are the old, the current, and the development releases.
If you are right, and 4.1 wasn't released, then the GCC web page might ne
Still not released (Score:5, Informative)
C and Objective-C (Score:3, Insightful)
I wince at the thought. The sick f*ck(s) deserves a pat on the back and a six-pack at least. Oh and a pay raise.
Re:C and Objective-C (Score:4, Interesting)
Mind you, the book is over 20 years old now.
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Some minor corrections ... (Score:5, Informative)
A modified version of Classpath has been included with GCJ since 3.2.
Azureus may start in GIJ 4.0, but won't work properly because it relies on parts of the Sun JDK which aren't completely implemented yet in GCJ.
Bogus Blathering (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What was wrong with Azureus? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What was wrong with Azureus? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Let me know when it stops sucking (Score:4, Insightful)
The true ideal is to be able to write code that if it compiles on gcc you can say "i know for certain that this is valid c++". Such a goal is difficult, if not impossible (many things are "implementation defined") but is stilla goal worth shooting for.
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