

GCC celebrates its 25th anniversary with the release of 4.7.0 - octoploid
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gcc.devel/125441

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pjmlp
Congratulations!

Before GCC existed, UNIX vendors used to sell the C compiler + tools in
expensive separate SDK, the same way the OSS community complains about certain
companies nowadays.

Without it, the way we develop software today would look really different.

~~~
mahmud
GNU liberated software, and software users. Long live the revolution!

~~~
gcp
The new revolution is that the compiler is for free but you need the right
patent licenses to use it. It's called LLVM. But they, it's modular, so we can
ignore that. For now.

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cbsmith
I was under the impression that [patents were no longer believed to be an
issue](<http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#patents> "LLVM Patent
Policy") any more than they'd be for GCC (which is arguably _more_ vulnerable
to patent issues).

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gillianseed
Why would gcc be more vulnerable to patent issues?

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marshray
The expression "A any more than B" doesn't imply B > 0, it just discusses A -
B.

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gillianseed
Eh, what? I responded to:

> GCC (which is arguably more vulnerable to patent issues)

And that statement certainly implies that A is _more_ vulnerable than B which
promted me to ask what would make it _more_ vulnerable as I can't see in what
way that would be true.

~~~
marshray
Ah, never mind then. :-)

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cliffbean
This sounds like an excellent occasion for the GCC maintainers to consider how
revision control software has progressed in the last 25 years, and to re-
evaluate the utility of the ChangeLog file; a manually maintained an "undo
list" for all commits.

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malkia
And to think that all that started (GNU), because Xerox denied giving the
source code for one of it's printers :)

Kudos to RMS.

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abrahamsen
The revision history go back almost that long (November 1988):
<https://www.ohloh.net/p/gcc/analyses/latest>

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winter_blue
By the way, does anyone know of an easy way to install gcc47 on OS X?

I've tried brew, port & fink to no avail.

~~~
andrus
The standard `./configure && make && make install` shouldn't be un-easy

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4ad
GCC can't be compiled by the LLVM compiler shipped with Mac OS X.

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ssmall
I thought gcc built its own bootstrap compiler to do the heavy lifting of the
build. Can LLVM not build the bootstrap compiler or was I mistaken in thinking
this?

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andrus
The bootstrap process for gcc involves first building gcc with an existing C
compiler, then rebuilding gcc from this first build [1].

I'm still waiting for my build to finish, but i686-apple-darwin11-llvm-gcc-4.2
seems to be handling the gcc 4.7 source fine.

[1] <http://gcc.gnu.org/install/build.html>

~~~
ssmall
Ah for some reason I had in my head the bootstrap was a smaller, simpler
compiler. Thanks for the link and clarification.

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stox
I'm feeling old. 25 years of compilation with gcc.

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hamidr
yup. Now lets discuss the modular system?

~~~
duaneb
GCC 5.0 [citation needed.] It was on HN and /r/programming a few days ago.

