Mostly-Unfair Criticisms of GCC

(Disclaimer: I used to be a fringe contributor to GCC some time back.)

GCC is a compiler for multiple languages and for multiple platforms. It
can work as a native compiler, a cross compiler and even a crossed-native
compiler (See http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Configure-Terms.html
for the meaning of these terms). It is very difficult to quickly produce
good code under such conditions. Given that, it is amazing that it is
able to do what it does.

By its very nature, a production-quality compiler is a complex beast and
GCC is particularly complex. There are very few people qualified enough
to make significant changes to such software. Being paid to do so helps
considerably when you take the time and effort involved into account. It
is no wonder that the major contributors are employed by Red Hat, Code
Sourcery, Google, Apple, etc.

The GCC maintainers do not take a particular pleasure in removing support
for various architectures. As the compiler evolves, someone who cares
about an architecture needs to maintain the respective back-end and
regularly post the results of running the GCC test-suite to the
"gcc-testresults" mailing list (so that other maintainers can check the
health of GCC for such an architecture).

If there is no such visible proof of an architecture being maintained
and no responses to pleas of help on the GCC mailing lists to help
maintain the respective back-end, it is natural for the GCC maintainers
to assume that no one is interested in maintaining the back-end. Such a 
back-end needs to be removed to keep the code-base maintainable.

Even then, an architecture is first deprecated in a release (and an 
announcement made so that some one who cares can still offer some help)
and then removed in a subsequent release - this gives about two years
for some one who cares about the architecture to save it.

i386 is used by the vast majority of the users of GCC as well as the
companies that support GCC, so it is not surprising that it is in the
best shape. There is no conspiracy to turn it into a "commercial"
compiler with support only for i386.

Having said that, some of the criticisms are valid.

GCC is indeed getting more and more complex with each release, not
to mention slower and slower. As with any complex software, it is easier
to add new features or fix bugs that your customers care about than
spend time and effort refactoring it and making it faster (but amazingly,
such work still happens with GCC).

GCC is intentionally not "modular" with parts that can be cleanly
separated and used because RMS was afraid that nefarious people would
be able to use this to subvert the GPL. In fact, for the same reason,
he was opposed for some time to the idea of the Java compiler (GCJ)
being able to produce JVM byte-code. Fortunately, good sense prevailed.

As GCC adds more and more front-ends and back-ends, it becomes more and
more difficult to ensure that your patch does not break anything. The
GCC bootstrapping process and its regression suite takes longer and longer.
This raises the barrier for anyone contemplating to contribute to GCC.
Perhaps GCC should just go back to being a good C/C++ compiler.