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GCC 4.1 Released 343

Posted by CowboyNeal 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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GCC 4.1 Released More

GCC 4.1 Released

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  • But... (Score:5, Funny)

    by brilinux ( 255400 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:09PM (#14110657) Journal
    But I just finished compiling 4.0...

    • I just moved to an operating system with 4.0. Wonder how long this'll take to hit the repositories.
      • Very likely never. You'll have to wait for the next major release, or install "unstable" packages.

        • Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)

          by strider44 ( 650833 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:33PM (#14110776)
          You're making too much of this. Between 4.0 and 4.1 isn't that big-a change. The only reason why it took so long for many distros to move between 3.3 and 3.4/4.0 was the change in the binary interface between the compilers. In other words a program compiled with 4.0 couldn't link to a library compiled with 3.3. There isn't this restriction between 4.0 and 4.1 so there's no reason why it can't go into the repositories straight after testing.

          • Re:But... (Score:2, Informative)

            by larry bagina ( 561269 )
            Just to clarify, the ABI changes only apply to C++ libraries/code, not C.
          • Ah, the wonders of a versioning system. If you understood it at all, you'd know that GCC 4.x would be incompatible with GCC 3.x. Going by this logic, GCC 4.1 should be an easy upgrade from GCC 4.0, but just as bad if you still had to upgrade from GCC 3.3 or 3.4.

            • Re:But... (Score:3, Informative)

              by strider44 ( 650833 )
              No actually that's wrong, if only slightly. GCC 3.3.* and below use a different C++ ABI to GCC 3.4, 4.0, and 4.1. Even Debian has upgraded from GCC 3.3 to GCC 4.0 so an incremental version upgrade shouldn't be too much of a deal.
    • Does it slice? Does it dice? Does it even make Julienne fries?

    • Re:But... (Score:5, Funny)

      by digidave ( 259925 ) on Friday November 25, 2005 @12:14AM (#14111203)
      "But I just finished compiling 4.0"

      You should have compiled it using 4.1. It's *much* faster.

  • Home depot (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Stevyn ( 691306 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:13PM (#14110674)
    Most people who program, myself included as an engineering student, probably take this for granted, but GCC is like having a Home Depot down the street that gives their stuff away. For no cost, anyone can use these tools to create just about anything they want. It's pretty amazing, and fitting for Thanksgiving to show some appreciation, that we all have access to these incredible tools for free.

    • Re:Home depot (Score:5, Informative)

      by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:37PM (#14110796)
      GCC is an impressive piece of software - either considered asopen source or in general. A lot of people preffer more "serious" C/C++ compilers, like Intels', but it's a remarkably good compiler by itself, very fast, produces stable and well optimized code AND it is available for every platform you could dream of developing on. Ah, and constantly improving support for other languages (specially Java) is a nice perk aswell :)

          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.

      • Re:Home depot (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Friday November 25, 2005 @12:32AM (#14111260) Journal
        I saw some benchmarks a few months ago that closes the gap in performance in c/c++ performance with gcc/g++ 4.0 and the Intel compilers.

        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.

      • Re:Home depot (Score:4, Insightful)

        by hackstraw ( 262471 ) * on Friday November 25, 2005 @12:49AM (#14111318)
        it's a remarkably good compiler by itself, very fast, produces stable and well optimized code AND it is available for every platform you could dream of developing on.

        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.
        • The most grateful aspect of gcc to the world is that Linux would be impossible without it. And that in itself is enough.

          Linux, *BSD, and every other single open source OS, as far as i know. Like you said, GCC paved the way for them to exist.

          As for the compiler itself, yes, it's not the best of the bunch, but that doesn't mean it's any bad either (quite the opposite!). Intels' compiler, for example, still beats it for performance (at least the last few times i tried it), but i c

          • Re:Home depot (Score:5, Interesting)

            by macshit ( 157376 ) * <snogglethorpe&gmail,com> on Friday November 25, 2005 @05:06AM (#14112018) Homepage
            As for the compiler itself, yes, it's not the best of the bunch, but that doesn't mean it's any bad either (quite the opposite!). Intels' compiler, for example, still beats it for performance (at least the last few times i tried it), but i could live happily with GCC alone.

            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.
      • Please refer to GCC as Free Software. Open Source is something completely different, and not nearly as inspiring, imho. Moreover, when GCC pretty much started the whole Free Software movement, it deserves a bit more caution in terminology ;)
        • All political discussion aside, isn't being Open Source a prerequisite of being Free Software (and to avoid stepping on toes: no, that does not mean that I think Open Source came before Free Software)? I think GCC is both Open Source and Free Software, simply because it needs to be Open Source if it's going to be Free Software; releasing your code and allowing others to fork it are key parts of both Open Source and Free Software. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that it's not *just* Open Source (whic

  • Know and love GCC (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JoeShmoe950 ( 605274 ) <CrazyNorman@gmail.com> on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:17PM (#14110686) Homepage
    As a developer, I love GCC. Its great, easy, and best of all free. GCC is probably one of the most benifical open source projects around, more important even than linux.

    • Re:Know and love GCC (Score:4, Funny)

      by AFairlyNormalPerson ( 721898 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:59PM (#14110891) Journal
      GCC is bigger than Jesus!

  • Masters of understatement (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ReformedExCon ( 897248 ) <reformed.excon@gmail.com> on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:19PM (#14110702)
    You'd never know it by the link provided that there was anything special about this release.

    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)

      by diegocgteleline.es ( 653730 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @11:14PM (#14110936)
      Hey, I like this: "GCC can now emit code for protecting applications from stack-smashing attacks. The protection is realized by buffer overflow detection and reordering of stack variables to avoid pointer corruption"

  • on the java side (Score:3, Interesting)

    by petermgreen ( 876956 ) <plugwash@@@p10link...net> on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:20PM (#14110705) Homepage
    are they using the gcj as chacheing jit (e.g. GCJ run on demand to turn class files into shared objects which are then loaded dynamically) system that was mentioned in one of the papers i read recently or what?

    • Re:on the java side (Score:4, Informative)

      by ghakko ( 261165 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @11:20PM (#14110961)
      The caching JIT has been available since 3.4, but is disabled by default. To turn it on, you'll need to add these switches to your gij command line:

      -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.
      • i think the idea was to precache most of the stuff your app would use and then let the caching jit take care of anything user supplied or otherwise not possible to precache.

  • Java status? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by harmonica ( 29841 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:20PM (#14110708)
    From the story: From what I know this includes the GNU Classpath merge and means that Azureus can now be used in a 100% Free-Software system.

    Sounds interesting. Is there any ChangeLog to read? I browsed the gcc and the gcj pages, but I couldn't find anything.

  • GCC is the Key to Open Source's Success (Score:5, Insightful)

    by slashfun ( 831726 ) <vinson@slashmail.org> on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:20PM (#14110709) Homepage
    For 13 years I have been a professional UNIX administrator, and if I had to pin down the single most influential software that help propel the Open Source revolution, I would name GCC.

    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.
    • Looks just like the Gentoo installation process to me.

      • Looks just like the Gentoo installation process to me.


        Not anymore. Gentoo has deprecated [gentoo.org] building the system from scratch and only supports binary installs now. Add on software is still compiled from source though.
        • This isn't necessary correct. You can still install from stage1 and stage2, it just won't be documented directly in the Install Doc because of too many users that were a bit too clueless at Linux attempting to do a stage1 install. Also it reduces the confusion and complexity for first-timers.

          Also considering the age of the packages found in all the stage tarballs all of them have been replaced by newer versions so when you install Gentoo you will actually recompile everything from source.

    • Re:GCC is the Key to Open Source's Success (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jbn-o ( 555068 ) <mail@digitalcitizen.info> on Thursday November 24, 2005 @11:11PM (#14110928) Homepage

      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:

      I appreciate the admiration expressed in your article about upgrading the GNU Compiler Collection [gnu.org], but it erred in describing the program as an "open source" programming tool. I developed GCC as part of the Free Software Movement [wikipedia.org]--so that people can use computers in freedom as part of a community.

      Free software means software that respects the users' freedom. The philosophy of the movement is that users of software should be free to run it, study it, change it, redistribute it and publish modified versions.

      With these freedoms, you're free to engage in cooperative development; you're also free to develop it on your own or to redistribute it unchanged. Describing this as a "philosophy of cooperative development" emphasizes one beneficial consequence of freedom at the expense of freedom itself.

      It was impossible in 1984 to use a computer in freedom, since all the operating systems were proprietary. So I launched the development of GNU, a free Unix-like operating system.

      A Unix-like system must include a C compiler, so I wrote one: GCC. I designed it to handle other languages, also, so that GNU users could use more than one. GCC, like the GNU/Linux operating system in which GCC is a crucial part, exists because of the ideals of the Free Software Movement--the ideals that are forgotten when speaking of open source.

      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.

      • Free Software is a subset of Open Source Software, so to say that GCC is Open Source is absolutely correct, if perhaps more general than RMS would prefer.

        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)

          by jbn-o ( 555068 ) <mail@digitalcitizen.info> on Thursday November 24, 2005 @11:45PM (#14111099) Homepage
          The philosophical difference RMS describes is quite clear and RMS points it out quite well. The benefits we get from free software are great, but they shouldn't be celebrated at the expense of celebrating the freedom free software gives us for its own sake. You can't "make that group as broad as you want or as narrow as you want" and still convey the same point. People might not know about software freedom, so it's easy to make that mistake without any malicious intent (as I think was the case here). But to set out to refer to programs like GCC—programs written to make software freedom real—in the name of a movement that was built in part to not mention software freedom is ahistorical.

        • Re:GCC is the Key to Open Source's Success (Score:4, Informative)

          by gnarlin ( 696263 ) on Friday November 25, 2005 @02:09AM (#14111523) Homepage Journal
          Free Software is a subset of Open Source Software, so to say that GCC is Open Source is absolutely correct, if perhaps more general than RMS would prefer.

          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

        • There is a reason why RMS insists it is "Free software" and not "open source software". There is an ethical aspect of the philosophy of free software which is cast aside when you say "open source software". He mentioned this explicitly on many occasions.

        • More people than you imagine ... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by hummassa ( 157160 ) on Friday November 25, 2005 @05:05AM (#14112013) Homepage Journal
          > 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.
          More people than you imagine do care.
          I know I do, and I know lots of others do, too.

        • NOT a subset (Score:3, Insightful)

          by CarpetShark ( 865376 )
          You can't philosophically be a subset of something you don't philosophically agree with. Free Software is Free Software. Open Source came later, and if anything, is a watered-down version of Free Software.

      • Re:GCC is the Key to Open Source's Success (Score:4, Insightful)

        by top_down ( 137496 ) on Friday November 25, 2005 @03:24AM (#14111730)
        You sound like a Jehovah's Witness citing the bible.

        Here is a list of contributors to GCC: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Contributors.htm l [gnu.org]

        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.

  • Azureus (Score:5, Funny)

    by DavidLeeRoth ( 865433 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:21PM (#14110710)
    Azurues can now be used in a 100% free system to download not so free software :)

  • Changelog? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Theovon ( 109752 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:21PM (#14110713)
    No mention of a changelog? If you're going to announce something, it sure would be nice to have a link to a page that explains some interesting stuff about what's new in it. I've tried looking at their wiki, but its 'news' section and its stuff on 4.1 hasn't been updated since like March.

  • That's good. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sheepdot ( 211478 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:22PM (#14110717) Journal
    From what I know this includes the GNU Classpath merge and means that Azureus can now be used in a 100% Free-Software system.

    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)

      by jsight ( 8987 )

      That's good for us, considering that the #1 use of Azureus is to pirate 100% commercial software.


      I doubt that. It's probably movies and tv shows.
    • [This has not too much to do with gcc, but...] You could do something about that. I use Azureus, and according to its accounting I have downloaded 14.5GB of stuff, and shared 371.9 of that back. All legal, some of it even the time it took to suck it down. For all the kvetching about the RIAA, you'd thing people would do more to raise the proportion of legal file sharing.

      [Ah, I CAN bring this back on topic.] The reason I use Azureus, and the reason that free software purists should be happy about this,

    • Re:That's good. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by slavemowgli ( 585321 )
      Is it? How do you know? Maybe it's just me, but I've uploaded about 150 GB in the past 7 months on BT on my measly 192 kbps uplink, and not a *single* bit of that was infringing on copyright. Why do people always think that BT doesn't have any uses besides copyright infringement? It's not true, and while it *seems* that copyright infringement accounts for a significant part of BT use, there simply is no data that would show that it's actually the #1 use (of course, there's no data that shows it's not the ca

  • Sense and portability (Score:3, Interesting)

    by noz ( 253073 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:22PM (#14110720)
    I was always angry with Sun touting Java(R)(TM)*** as portable when run-time environments were made available for only a small (albeit popular) set of architecture/operating system pairs. My Alpha running Debian at home and my Alpha running FreeBSD at work were left cold, lonely, and wanting Java; running a subset of Java applications with free software partial implementations. This is a triumph for FOSS.

  • I'm thinking of contributing to GCC... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TwoBit ( 515585 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:23PM (#14110724)
    I love GCC, but I lament that its ability to do inlining is rather bad.
    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)

      by larry bagina ( 561269 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:50PM (#14110847) Journal
      Depends. Did you get an A++ in your graduate-level compiler construction class? Are you willing to spend a couple months (or more) reading through the gcc source code to get an understanding of how all the pieces work. Are you willing to spend a few more months testing your optimizations (mathematically and with source code) to make sure they don't break anything?

      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.

      • Parent's not kidding. GCC contribution is non-trivial.

        I got an A in my 4th-year undergrad compiler construction course, and build toy languages with flex and bison on a regular basis (about one every 18 months for 8 years).

        And the GCC code is way hard stuff.

  • A big thanks to the GCC team. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:26PM (#14110747)
    Well, it's Thanksgiving, so let's give all the good folks in the GCC team a big warm Thanks for all the years of improvement to this centrally important software package. Without GCC, it is doubtful that the free software movement could be taking place at all. And with the improvements that have been added in the last year or two, GCC is getting to the point that commercial software vendors will have to come up with some really innovative ideas to compete with it, even for production of commercial software! In fact, I think all software for the Mac is compiled with GCC 4 and onwards.

    Thanks folks, and happy Thanksgiving.

  • Actually, it's not released yet (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dan Berlin ( 682091 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:33PM (#14110775)
    I'm not sure what gave the person who submitted the story, or the editor who posted the story, the idea that 4.1 was released, but it isn't. In fact, it was just branched less than a week ago. We haven't even put out an RC yet! Really, it's not out. When it is, you will see something sent to gcc-announce

    • I'm not sure what gave the person who submitted the story, or the editor who posted the story, the idea that 4.1 was released, but it isn't.

      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

    • GCC website (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Per Abrahamsen ( 1397 )
      It is surprisingly hard to find out what the current release is from the GCC webpages. The front page has a misleading 4.1. Press "Releases", and you get a misleading 3.4.4. You have to go on to the "Development plan", under Future timeline [gnu.org], to find the actual latest and greatest 4.0.2 somewhere down the ASCII art tree.

  • Still not released (Score:5, Informative)

    by lancelott ( 840771 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @10:37PM (#14110797)
    GCC 4.1.0 is not yet out as far as I know. This story is misleading. Just because the site lists 4.1.0 on the front does not mean it is out. Notice that it doesn't have a release date on it.
  • Azureus can now be used in a 100% Free-Software system.

    For those of us who aren't Linux geeks :) what was wrong with Azureus before?
    • Azureus is programmed in Java. Therefore it had to execute under a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) as provided by Sun or IBM. All of these JRE's are not free. Now Azureus can be compiled by GCC (which is free), Azureus can be executed in a 100% free environment.

      • Thanks for the info, I have one more question though - that's just me knowing pretty much nothing about Java. Say I have an existing installation of Azureus and upgrade to GCC 4.1. Does that mean I could scrap my JRE? Or would I have to recompile Azureus to do that?

        • You would need to recompile Azureus using GCC.
        • You may be able to use Azureus as is with gij(gnu intepreter for java) as opposed to natively compiling it with gcj(gnu compiler for java).
          Considering that Azureus pulls down bytecode updates, gij is probably the way to go.

          I've been using gij and gcj for a while in fedora and am very pleased with how its development is coming along.
          That said, I would go scrapping the Sun jre just yet.

          Though I haven't tried this new 4.1 version, I have had some minor issues with gij/gcj and the java apps I'm using and even
      • Do you lose any functionality by compiling Java to machine code? Maybe not with Azureus, but in general don't some of Java's features preclude compiling directly to machine code (as opposed to JVM code)?

        Clearly you could just avoid using those features, but I'm curious if you get "full-featured" Java when using the GCC Java compiler.
      • I'm still not following :(

        You say that JREs are not free, but, as jofi points out below, Sun's JRE seems to be free.

  • C and Objective-C (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SpinJaunt ( 847897 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @11:17PM (#14110947)
    * The old Bison-based C and Objective-C parser has been replaced by a new, faster hand-written recursive-descent parser.


    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)

      by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt AT nerdflat DOT com> on Friday November 25, 2005 @02:31AM (#14111568) Journal
      Hmmm... the textbook I used in the compiler course I took way back in the olden days said that recursive descent compilers were, in general, slower and in general larger than state-based ones.

      Mind you, the book is over 20 years old now.

      • Re:C and Objective-C (Score:3, Interesting)

        by am 2k ( 217885 )

        According to a lecture I took last year, this has changed in recent years. Now it's much more important to work on a small set of data at a time, since the processors have large caches. The recursive approach helps to keep the data you're working on inside the cache.

        20 years ago nobody had a cache, so it was an imperative to keep your stack size down.

  • IANAGCCD (I am NOT a GCC developer ;-))) but AFAIK we should all thanks to RedHat for putting lot of "people-time" (read - money) into GCC and making constant improvements of it!

  • Some minor corrections ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ghakko ( 261165 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @11:52PM (#14111125)
    GCC 4.1 has not been released yet.

    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.
    • GCC 4.1 has not been released yet.

      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.

      Thank you for posting some actually useful and accurate information, which is exactly what I was looking for after the extraordinary claims of this poster. Looks like the original poster really went off half-cocked, even beyond most /. standards. Guess I don't need

  • Bogus Blathering (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ChaoticCoyote ( 195677 ) on Friday November 25, 2005 @08:04AM (#14112477) Homepage
    As many have pointed out, GCC 4.1 is actually several months away from release. Slashdot "editors" might want to learn about a concept called "fact checking." I'm disturbed by the amount of GCC bashing in this list. I've never met a perfect compiler, and GCC is far superior to many commercial tools I've used. It provides professional-quality C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran 95 (almost), Java, and Ada compilers for dozens of platforms; the code generation is imprefect, but then again so is most of the code GCC is required to compile! The vile lack of appreciation for GCC simply astounds me -- it is the foundation of Free Software. And it is a fine piece of work that is constantly growing and evolving -- though not as fast as Slashdot's headlines might suggest... ;)

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