GCC 13.1 released

[Posted April 26, 2023 by corbet]

Version 13.1 of the GCC compiler suite has been released.

This release integrates a frontend for the Modula-2 language which was previously available separately and lays foundation for a frontend for the Rust language which will be available in a future release.

Other changes include the removal of support for the STABS debugging-information format, addition of a number of C++23 features, a number of static-analyzer improvements, support for a number of recent CPU features, and more. See this page for details.

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GCC 13.1 released

Posted Apr 27, 2023 7:37 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (5 responses)

Somebody seriously still uses Modula-2?

GCC 13.1 released

Posted Apr 27, 2023 8:05 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

Might start using it again, now that it comes with GCC... not that I ever did very much with it, but I had the compiler for the PC ordered from Fitted Software Tools. Back in 1985 or so, I saw a demo of the Module-2 based workstation by Wirth's team at the ETH. Glimpse of an alternate timeline,
the history of computer security might have been different if Modula-2 had become widespread, instead of C.

GCC 13.1 released

Posted May 1, 2023 19:13 UTC (Mon) by bartoc (guest, #124262) [Link]

Oberon-07 is basically "what if Niklaus Wirth designed C. It's a very minimal and easy to implement language but keeps some of the best bits of Pascal (in particular it has a module system, no textual inclusion). I kinda wish there existed a high quality Oberon-07 toolchain, although for any usecase that isn't Wirth's tiny little bootstrapped OS I suspect a bunch of extensions would be made and you'd end up somewhat closer to freepascal or Delphi.

All these languages (including C, and Delphi, even though it tries) have the problem that it's basically impossible to implement your own data structure that works like the built-in ones. The syntax just isn't there. I think this is because to do that you either need something that works like C++ references or some way to customize subscripting that differs depending on if the subscript expression is mutable or not (nim's `[]` vs `[]=`, along with `var`, or rust's Index vs IndexMut). Delphi's array properties try to do the second thing but fail a little bit because the return value is the wrong type, so you can't do like array[idx].some_method() and have that method mutate the thing inside the array.

GCC 13.1 released

Posted Apr 28, 2023 4:35 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (1 responses)

Once upon a time FreeBSD had a critical piece of infrastructure in Modula-3. (I'm not sure of the difference between Modula-3, Modula-2, Pascal. I just remember this!) It was "cvsup", the recommended way to sync your tree, and was written by a guy who was proud of using "not-C" and maintained the only working Modula-3 compiler. Eventually they ended up writing a reimplementation in C. And still later they moved to git.

GCC 13.1 released

Posted Apr 28, 2023 9:28 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

I never used it, but I recall from reading that Modula-3 was quite different, except for the style of the syntax. For example, it had garbage collection, whereas Modula-2 (and Pascal) had manual memory management. It was used even less than Modula-2, even though it might have been more practical for application programming.

GCC 13.1 released

Posted Apr 28, 2023 5:41 UTC (Fri) by simlo (guest, #10866) [Link]

I worked for a company who in the late 90s converted from Modula2 to C++ for their embedded 8086.