"Heraldry test?"

Posted Mar 23, 2012 2:26 UTC (Fri) by ghane (guest, #1805)
In reply to: "Heraldry test?" by flewellyn
Parent article: GCC celebrates 25 years with the 4.7.0 release

In this case the current GCC is from the bastard (and disowned) son of the family (EGCS), who took over the coat of arms when the legitimate branch of the family died out, and was blessed by all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection#EGCS...

My grandfather's axe, my father changed the handle, I changed the blade, but it is still my grandfather's axe.

--
Sanjeev Gupta

"Heraldry test?"

Posted Mar 23, 2012 3:40 UTC (Fri) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] (2 responses)

Ahhhh, thank you. I knew the history of GCC, but didn't connect it to that metaphor. Thanks very much.

"Heraldry test?"

Posted Mar 23, 2012 20:43 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (1 responses)

The use of the metaphor is mistaken. Much of the code in the first egcs release that wasn't in GCC 2.7.x was already checked in to the FSF tree, and merges continued to take place back and forth. Thinking that GCC was somehow a completely new compiler with the same name after the EGCS/GCC remerger is just wrong. Furthermore it was the same people developing the compiler before and after. What really happened was that there was a management shakeup.

"Heraldry test?"

Posted Mar 25, 2012 1:03 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite. It wasn't even 'depose the king, he goes into exile'; kenner is *still* contributing to GCC now and then, and was contributing to egcs even while he was also maintaining trunk GCC.