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GNU is Not Unix Programming IT Technology

GCC Gets Its Own News Site 41

Posted by timothy from the specialization-of-labor dept.
Marcel Cox writes "In an effort to promote the development of GCC, Mathieu Lacage created a GCC news page similar to the idea of Kernel Traffic. While we are on the topic of GCC, it might be worthwhile recalling two major events that occured during the last month: 1. The tree-ssa branch has been merged into mainline, which among others means the end of G77 and the addition of GFORTRAN, the new GNU Fortran 95 compiler. 2. The second annual GCC Developer's summit took place some 10 days ago in Ottawa."
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GCC Gets Its Own News Site More

GCC Gets Its Own News Site

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  • a simple question... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...that I can't figure out based on what I found on the websites.

    I could poke around, but I'm too lazy.

    Is the Fortran 95 compiler in any of the stable gcc releases (e.g., 3.4)? If not, when will it appear as a standard part of the suite?
    • The Fortran 95 compiler has not been released yet. It is part of the mainline which will become GCC 3.5 or 4.0 depending on what version number they will finally agree on for the next version.
      The new version is tentatively scheduled for the end of the year. If you want to test it right now, you can always try the weekly development snapshots.

      • The new version is tentatively scheduled for the end of the year.

        I doubt it. Gcc has quite consistently had a one year release cycle for the past few years, with releases occuring in February -> May.

        Given that this one is a bigger release, with the tree-ssa changes (and as you say, it might even be called 4.0), I wouldn't be surprised if the schedule slips somewhat.

        I think it would be incredible it there is a release this year.
        • We have here a fine example of a gap between theory and practice. The GCC project has a development plan [gnu.org] according to which, a new version would be released about every 6 months. However so far, they project has never managed to follow the schedule and new releases slipped by many months. So while it's true that the new version is scheduled to be released at the end of this year, it is well possible that it doesn't make it.

  • The future of GCC (LLVM?) (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Qwavel ( 733416 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @12:28AM (#9438972)
    First off, thanks to all the people who contributed to GCC.

    I think that version 3.4 for C++ was a very important release. It's great that there are now a series of compilers for Windows and Linux that are highly standards compliant and reasonably compatible with each other. I am referring to GCC and VC71 on Windows, and GCC and Intel on Linux.

    The decision of the GCC people to focus on correctness and standards compliance before optimization was correct in my opinion.

    On the other hand, I'm concerned that the most exciting ideas from last years GCC conference do not appear to be on the GCC roadmap, and are not mentioned in the proceedings of this years conference (pls correct me if I'm wrong).
    http://people.redhat.com/lockhart/.gcc04/ MasterGCC -2side.pdf

    The ideas I'm referring to are LLVM and the compile server. I know that development on LLVM is progressing well, but I haven't heard anymore about it becoming part of GCC. The 'compile server' idea involved starting a single process that managed the compilation of all the translation units in a module, rather than running GCC once for each TU.

    I realize these are big changes - are they on the horizon for 4.0?
    • Unfortunately, the FSF currently has a rather strict policy regarding GCC development which does not permit implementing features like LLVM. I hope this policy will change some time as currently it seems to be a bit blocking for certain interresting features that could be implemented. See the following discussion for this policy:
      http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2003-11/msg00402.html [gnu.org]
      • As I see it, they just won't export the gcc internal structure.
        So fork gcc, or contribute patches to them that does what one wants.
        See also http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/
        • You can easily fork GCC, but the problem is maintaining it after the fork, especially if you want to include changes of the mainline GCC after your fork. Beside, it would still be the main GCC that would continue to be used by 99% of the people and so all your efforts are kind of wasted.
          A far more productive approach on the long run would be to try to make the FSF realize how much their policy is currently blocking GCC development and relax their rules.
          • Maybe http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-05/msg00679.html ?

            "GCC can dump its internal representation in a C-like syntax using the
            new -fdump-tree-... switches."
            • This is a one way dump for debugging purposes. You cannot dump the tree, do some transformations on it, and then reimport it again into GCC. That would be the kind of thing that the policy wants to forbid.

          • You can easily fork GCC, but the problem is maintaining it after the fork, especially if you want to include changes of the mainline GCC after your fork.

            The egcs project who did just that was very successful.

            • The egcs project who did just that was very successful.
              Yes, but it was the major developers that did the fork, not just someone who came along. Also, the fork was not to bypass political rules, but rather to make major changes to the compiler that people thought were to invasive for the production version of GCC.
              Of course, the LLVM project mentioned here is more in the direction you suggest. The initial compiler is GCC based, but the way LLVM works would not be permitted in GCC according to the current
  • I thought that's what developers.slashdot.org was. :-P

  • ...what are SSA trees? A little googling reveals they are:

    • A popular subject on the GCC mailing lists, where everyone seems to already know what they are.
    • Good, somehow implying that !SSA == bad.

    I'm not a compiler writer (duh), I'm just curious.

  • An update as of June 21st has been posted. The newsletter is also now accessible via http://gccnews.chatta.us [chatta.us].

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