egcs to become gcc

An anonymous reader sent us this page (its in german! Use babelfish) which says that EGCS has been accepted as the official compiler of the GNU Project by RMS. I've seen a lot of confirmation of this, but nothing official on the GNU website. Anyway, I'm glad to see it. EGCS is a great compiler- it'll be even cooler once its simply GCC! Update: 04/21 01:26 by J : The GNU website has been updated. The EGCS steering committee has been renamed, and is now officially in charge of GCC.

Executive summary?

The primary difference is the development model. EGCS is bazaar [tuxedo.org]-style, whereas FSF gcc's was cathedral [tuxedo.org]-styl e.

What this meant in practice, was that EGCS advanced rapidly, and has succeeded in reintegrating most of the separate GCC development communities (C++, Ada, Fortran, Pascal, Pentium optimisations) with major improvements (Haifa scheduler, integrated testsuite, much closer to C++ standard).

yes, it's true; egcs is gcc. Some details

As a member of the egcs steering committee [cygnus.com], which will become the gcc steering commitee, I can confirm that yes, the merger is official ... sometime in the near future there will be a gcc 3.0 from the egcs code base. The steering committee has been talking to RMS about doing this for months now; at times it's been contentious but now that we understand each other better, things are going much better.

The important thing to understand is that when we started egcs, this is what we were planning all along (well, OK, what some of us were planning). We wanted to change the way gcc worked, not just create a variant. That's why assignments always went to the FSF, why GNU coding style is rigorously followed.

Technically, egcs/gcc will run the same way as before. Since we are now fully GNU, we'll be making some minor changes to reflect that, but we've been doing them gradually in the past few months anyway so nothing that significant will change. Jeff Law remains the release manager; a number of other people have CVS write access; the steering committee handles the "political" and other nontechnical stuff and "hires" the release manager.

egcs/gcc is at this point considerably more bazaar-like than the Linux kernel in that many more people have the ability to get something into the official code (for Linux, only Linus can do that). Jeff Law decides what goes in the release, but he delegates major areas to other maintainers.

The reason for the delay in the announcement is that we were waiting for RMS to announce it (he sent a message to the gnu.*.announce lists), but someone cracked an important FSF machine and did an rm -rf / command. It was noticed and someone powered off the machine, but it appears that this machine hosted the GNU mailing lists, if I understand correctly, so there's nothing on gnu.announce. I don't know why there's still nothing on www.gnu.org (which was not cracked). Why do people do things like this?

pgcc still separate

I've seen several people seem to be confused here thinking that the merger of egcs and gcc means having a Pentium-optimized gcc as the standard C compiler. This is not the case. As of yesterday, there were a number of compilers out there:

gcc-2.7.2.x: Required for Linux 2.0.x kernel builds due to bugs in the kernel code, and possibly more stable for some 2.2.x kernels, though it is less clear whether that is due to the kernel or the other compilers. Though it includes various front ends, generally it is only used for C anymore.

gcc-2.8.x: A major upgrade to gcc; the "standard" gcc. Like always, includes C, C++, and other front ends.

egcs-1.1.2: The actively-developed gcc spinoff. This is generally regarded as being superior for C++ and every bit as good for C as gcc-2.8. For most people, this is a total replacement for gcc-2.8.

pgcc-1.1.x: This is an egcs spinoff, with active development on various compiler optimizations, particularly emphasising Pentium-specific improvements. Because optimization is about as deep into the arcane black arts of compilers as you can get, it is not surprising that pgcc is believed to be less stable than egcs. However, some of the more solid optimizations have been integrated into egcs. Think of it as the "Really Experimental EGCS."

So the upshot of all this is that we can scratch gcc-2.8 from the above list soon. My guess is that the FSF will release a new gcc-2.8 identical to the latest egcs, and egcs will either continue development separately from gcc (with occasional releases of gcc based on the egcs updates), or that egcs will simply be renamed gcc.

We will still need 2.7.2.x for anyone keeping up with 2.0.x kernels. We still might want pgcc for optimizing x86 code. We still want egcs/gcc for compiling things when we don't trust pgcc.