Thank you for your thoughtful and patient reply. I should probably apologize for the strident tone of my first letter to this mailing list. It reflects a decades-long frustration with the trends in the computer industry, rather than a specific critique of ggc development itself. Gcc is a wonderful compiler, and has done a lot for the liberation of programming from proprietary shackles. I am in awe of what its developers have accomplished.
On Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:50:11 -0400, Daniel Berlin wrote: > On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 2:30 PM, Hendrik Boom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: >> >> There are a number of languages that would probably be better-suited to >> programming gcc than C or C++, on technical grounds alone. > > > That's great. > We have more than just technical concerns. I agree. > >> But if it is a requirement for using a language that everyone >> already knows it, we will forever be doomed to C and its insecure >> brethren. >> > This has never been listed as a requirement. It is certainly a > consideration. > The main requirement for communities like GCC for something like > changing languages is consensus or at least a large set of active > developers willing to do something and the rest of them willing to not > commit suicide if it happens. > There are secondary requirements like "not stalling for years while > moving languages", "not losing serious performance", etc. > > You are free to propose whatever language you like. It is unlikely you > will get support from any of the active contributors simply saying we > should use X because Y. > The best way to show us the advantages of using some other languages is > to convert some part of GCC to use it and show how much better it is. > > This is a big job, of course. Then again, tree-ssa was started by diego > as a side project, and gained supporters and helpers as others decided > to spend their time on it. > You may find the same thing, in which case you may find it is not hard > to convince people to move to some other language. You may find nobody > agrees with you, even after seeing parts of gcc in this new language. > I can guarantee you you will find nobody agrees with you if you sit on > the sidelines and do nothing but complain. > > --Dan I first started using C and Algol 68 in 1975 -- C on a PDP-11, and Algol 68 on a CDC Cyber. Without doubt, Algol 68 was a better language for most programming, but its operating environment (the NOS operating system) was so hostile that I preferred the PDP-11 (with Unix). It has been the Unix operating system that has carried C to the ubiquitous presence it has today. C is a 30-year-old language. Most people adopt C nowadays because everyone else is using it, even though there are much better 20-year-old languages available. I've spent years of my life tracking down dangling pointers in other people's C code while hired to do development on existing projects, all the while remembering that the first program I wrote in Algol 68 was over a thousand lines long, contained complicated data structures, and ran correctly the first time it passed through the compiler without compile-time diagnostics. Don't get me wrong. I can write C. I can write C++. I've even written a substantial part of a C++ implementation in C++. That said, I understand the inertia of an existing code base. Gcc is as much the victim of the curse of compatibility as a multitude of other projects. C++ is a big improvement over C, if you can restrict yourself to a comprehensible subset (as you are apparently attempting to do). And it has, qua inertia, the enormous advantage that it's possible to incrementally move a large project from C to C++. But I am still frustrated by the enormous pain the industry inflict on itself by persisting is using such flawed tools for new projects. -- hendrik
