
Happy 30th birthday to GCC - ot
http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2017/03/22/happy-30th-birthday-to-gcc/
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gumby
A side note: this historical recap references the 1997 fork and points to my
note announcing it. At the time, forking was considered a deep disaster; this
fork led to the current "fork often culture."

One important activity at Cygnus was _eliminating_ forks. People would make a
local, non-portable change and then distribute the result (with source, thank
you GPL!). At one point John had collected over 30 different version of gdb,
which he eventually managed to wrangle into a single distro.

So when gcc development ground to a halt, and I realized we had to split off,
I spent months on the phone with various key developers, and with rms. All the
other devs were frustrated with what was going on, but feared a fork. The
result we came up with wasn't owned by any one company (we had no interest at
Cygnus in making a "proprietary" fork, whatever that would mean) but had a
committee and developed a more formal process.

Of course later developments like git allowed much much finer forking
granularity.

LLVM has been great for gcc. gcc development had slowed down IMHO and got
better faster in order to stay ahead. These days I do a lot of compilation
with LLVM first, switching to gcc for some different diagnostics, better
standards conformance and cases where it generates better code (I'm using a
mainline language, C++ on mainline CPUs, x86 & ARM, plus CUDA). I suspect I'll
finally give up gcc in a year or two.

------
brudgers
From Wikipedia:

 _In an effort to bootstrap the GNU operating system, Richard Stallman asked
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, the author of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit (also known as
the Free University Compiler Kit) if he could use that software for GNU. When
Tanenbaum told him that while the Free University was free, the compiler was
not, Stallman decided to write his own.Stallman 's initial plan was to rewrite
an existing compiler from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory from Pastel to C with
some help from Len Tower and others. Stallman wrote a new C front end for the
Livermore compiler, but then realized that it required megabytes of stack
space, an impossibility on a 68000 Unix system with only 64 KB, and concluded
he would have to write a new compiler from scratch. None of the Pastel
compiler code ended up in GCC, though Stallman did use the C front end he had
written._

 _GCC was first released March 22, 1987, available by FTP from MIT. Stallman
was listed as the author but cited others for their contributions, including
Jack Davidson and Christopher Fraser for the idea of using RTL as an
intermediate language, Paul Rubin for writing most of the preprocessor and
Leonard Tower for "parts of the parser, RTL generator, RTL definitions, and of
the Vax machine description."_

It reminds me that the success of Stallman's free software movement is in no
small part due to Stallman being an incredibly talented programmer...Emacs or
GCC alone and separately would probably be enough to put him in a hacker
pantheon.

