GCC unplugged [LWN.net]

GCC unplugged

Posted Nov 20, 2007 0:08 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: GCC unplugged by yokem_55
Parent article: GCC unplugged

Would it be a bad thing if GCC suffered the same fate as XFree86? A project which had been
gridlocked and stagnant became much more exciting very suddenly, attracted a lot of developer
attention and rapidly met a lot of goals that had been on people's wishlists for ages.

In fact, this happened in the late 90s, when egcs forked off of GCC and eventually the
non-fork was abandoned and egcs was officially adopted going forward. As far as I can tell,
this allowed GCC to be largely rewritten with a different design without exposing end users to
a compiler that didn't yet work, followed by a sudden leap forward in GCC capabilities when
the egcs version was strictly better than the old fork and replaced it.

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GCC unplugged

Posted Nov 20, 2007 19:35 UTC (Tue) by stevenb (guest, #11536) [Link]

GCC has also been largely rewritten after egcs became the official GCC.  First there was the
rtlopt-branch, later the tree-ssa-branch, and most recently the dataflow-branch.  End users
have not really noticed most of these big changes, as far as I'm aware (except, I hope, much
better code generation for C++ since GCC 4.0 ;-))