Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 26 Oct 1998 09:40:05 -0800 (PST) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: 2.2.0 and egcs 1.1 was Re: Sorry, wrong gcc-version |
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On Mon, 26 Oct 1998, Khimenko Victor wrote: > LT> The assembler used to be correct, and the gcc people unilaterally decided > LT> to change the rules. > > It's their right to change rules. And now this assembler is incompatible with > egcs 1.1b (it's not "incorrect" since there are no standards for such assembler). > And thus should be fixed.
It's their right to change the rules, yes.
It's not their right to then suddenly say that everybody who plays with the old rules is "broken". As a result, I still consider the older gcc's to be the default compiler.
The thing is, that the Linux kernel is one of the very very few pieces of code that really exercises some of the gcc features. That's sad, because it means that when the gcc people see a bug-report about Linux, they apparently think that "hey, we're seeing so many Linux kernel bug-reports and so few of anything else that it must be a kernel problem rather than a compiler problem". Instead of realizing that the reason there are problems with Linux that do not crop up anywhere else is that a kernel is special, and has things that no other program tends to have.
As a result, neither party is really willing to talk to the other party. Yes, I'm guilty of that too, but I just got fed up with some of the responses to my complaints about real gcc bugs.
It's entirely possible that egcs-1.1b (or whatever the current egcs is) is bug-free. But I'm not even testing it because of my bad experiences with some of the previous bugs.
And I also acknowledge that gcc-2.7.2 often may have the same bugs, and that they just aren't instantiated due to not doing some of the new kinds of optimizations. But I have heard egcs people mention this as some kind of excuse to move up to a new compiler that has the same bugs and _shows_ them, and I don't follow that logic at all.
Linus
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