Re: [Gnu-arch-users] details, details

[Karel Gardas]

On Wed, 7 Sep 2005, Thomas Lord wrote:

> This appears to be quite similar to the pattern that played out
> with GCC and its "friendly, experimental" fork, EGCS.   The
> volunteer-managed FSF GCC progressed "too slowly" for businesses
> at the time and through a similar set of maneuvers, it was forked
> and then displaced.  It was inconceivable to the commercial hackers
> I spoke with back then that what they were doing was wrong.  They
> were sold on the idea that "progress" meant their businesses getting
> ahead as cheaply and as short-term-oriented as possible.   The resulting
> dog-pile-on-the-code approach resulted, predictably, in a bloated
> monolith of a compiler and complete neglect of contemporaneous
> efforts to get compiler construction back on the track of producing
> simple, maintainable systems.  Management oriented towards a slower
> growth path for those businesses and business units, marketing aimed
> at educating customers about why this was desirable -- those ideas
> were simply not on the table.

That's interesting information. But let say I also do have some experience 
with egcs/gcc these days at least from C++ user point of view and I can 
only add that I was happy like a small child trying egcs1.0.1 since it 
provided me with the C++ compiler which consumed _only_ about 30-40MB of 
RAM for compiling our project in comparison with gcc of these days which 
spent twice this amount. Note: 32MB RAM was quite a lot in 1996/7.

So thanks to egcs hackers I've been able to complete my school projects 
with much less pain.

Also the second note: current GCC release manager is doing good job IMHO 
provided as a commercial service by his small company to the big IT 
sponsor. I think this is also needed to note since every coin has two 
sides...

Cheers,
Karel
--
Karel Gardas                  address@hidden
ObjectSecurity Ltd.           http://www.objectsecurity.com