Subject: Re: egcs
To: Todd Vierling <tv@pobox.com>
From: David Edelsohn <dje@watson.ibm.com>
List: port-powerpc
Date: 08/05/1998 14:37:56
>>>>> Todd Vierling writes:
Todd> On Wed, 5 Aug 1998, David Edelsohn wrote:
Todd> I'm referring to the various reports I have read on egcs-bugs@cygnus.com,
Todd> which I've read since the egcs beta days. Out of all the
Todd> platforms that 1.0.3 supports, only i386 and sparc have fairly solid C
Todd> codegen; other platforms are missing some bits in optimization (and some,
Todd> like arm, will sometimes generate broken code without optimization). The
Todd> generalization about 1.0.3 is pretty valid - just ask random people at
Todd> Cygnus how much they would trust 1.0.3 for big production projects. :)
This depends on the platform and Architecture. Cygnus has
switched their releases to an EGCS base.
Todd> I've been wary of running egcs 1.0.3 on anything but i386 for a while
Todd> because of this. There have been too many "this is broken" reports with
Todd> valid code that have been replied to with, "Fixed in 1.1 mainline." C++ is
Todd> worse - it's rather broken even on i386.
Again, every compiler has bugs. With gcc-2.7, we always said
fixed in gcc-2.8. There always will be bug reports and those always will
be fixed in the next release.
Todd> You'll note that I keep saying i386 works well in C: that's Linux's
Todd> mainstay architecture, and also the one that had the worst liberties taken
Todd> by programmers that you later mentioned.
Linux/PPC and MkLinux use egcs-1.0.3. The latest Linux/PPC CD and
MkLinux DR3 was just released and shipped with that compiler. Yes, it has
problems but nothing earth-shattering.
David