On 02.23 Paul Giordano wrote:
> http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.96.html
>
> While I understand that the cooker's generally considered "alpha" code, many
> of us see it as the precursor to the next release - are you planning on
> releasing Mandrake 8.0 it with gcc 2.96, clearly against the developer's
> specific advice (as in the above URL)? I really want to try this out, but I
> can't see doing so with the current libstdc++ locked into so many rpm's at the
> 2.96 code base.
>
Don't look at the nowadays gcc-2.96 in cooker like the initial alpha snapshot.
It is closer to the 3.0 snapshots.
gcc-2.96 has many changes that make it generate much better code than any gcc
before, AFAIK. And to be more correct and efficient, especially g++.
The problem was that when RedHat and Mdk took the source
snapshot to ship gcc-2.96 the optimizer was very broken in certain silly
things. But with the level of patching it has suffered since then, it is
really near a real compiler. I have been building kernels with it since
2.2.18 - 2.3.x and now it compiles perfectly my 2.4.2-ac3. It does not
imply that there was still some obscure driver used not so often which
can still trigger some gcc bug (and many of that 'bugs' are not bugs, but
badly written code relaying on gcc doing low level things in a certain way
you should not suppose, like guessing which alignment the compiler is going
to do inside a struct, how will it pad the struct, and so on).
In my oppinion (I also cried 'how can they ship that') using 2.96, even in
alpha or beta stage, has helped to clean much code.
--
J.A. Magallon $> cd pub
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] $> more beer
Linux werewolf 2.4.2-ac1 #2 SMP Fri Feb 23 02:34:42 CET 2001 i686
