Linux developers have love/hate relationship with gcc

Posted Oct 25, 2007 21:50 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: OpenBSD not the only ones grumbling about gcc by rfunk
Parent article: A potential competitor for GCC: pcc

For example they refused for a looong time to switch from gcc 2.7.2.x to gcc 2.95 and later to gcc 3.x - yet today they happily abandoned gcc 2.95 because it's "too buggy". They like bugfixes in gcc (when it makes life easier for kernel developers) but they hate to fix bugs in kernel (when new gcc produces incorrect code because it uses more aggressive optimizations) - it all is quite natural. Yet they are not insane enough to try to port Linux kernel to anything else - because they need portable free compiler which generates fast code and that currently means gcc...