On Tue, 19 Jan 1999, fantumn (Steven Baker) wrote: > Okay, I don't want to start a holy war or anything here, but I have some > questions about egcs and gcc. > > First, was wondering _what_ the differences between gcc and egcs were.
It is mostly a matter of version gcc 2.7.* has been used forever and some code tweaks some bugs init g++ 2.7.* is a non-ansi C++ compiler and some code uses ansi C++ features or g++ 2.7 specific featurs gcc 2.8 is a new gcc release that is seemingly becoming widely used on non-linux platforms (at least my univ has upgraded every machine) it is mostly compatible with 2.7.* but cannot compile a 2.0 kernel at a high optimization level (the inline ASM in 2.0 relied on things 2.7 did) g++ 2.8 is a more than 2.7 ansi conforming C++ compiler, and again code written with 2.8 probably doesn't work with 2.7 egcc <whatever> is gcc 2.9-BETA (or 3.0-BETA) in effect, it supports more/less platforms and has more optimizations and other things eg++ is like egcc and is largely compatible with g++ 2.8 however it implements even more of the C++ standard (still not all :<) Debian uses eg++ for our g++ because 2.7 is effectively useless (it encourages code that will not work on other C++ compilers) and we use 2.7 for our gcc because nobody has patched the 2.0 kernels to work with another gcc. Effectively 2.7.* is dead and all development is focused on egcs - apparently the gcc people will take code from egcs to create the next gcc releases or something. Jason