
GCC 4.6.3 Released - voodoochilo
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2012-03/msg00006.html
======
keithwinstein
It will be interesting to see if the not-so-friendly competition between GCC
and Clang (where a license schism bears a large part of the responsibility for
the split) can mirror the not-so-friendly competition between GNOME and KDE
(where a license schism also bore a large part of the responsibility for the
split).

In the GNOME/KDE case, unpleasant as it was, the competition probably ended up
helping both desktop environments mature.

~~~
ruediger
Why is the competition not-so-friendly? I believe GCC has already improved due
to Clang at least a lot of the error message improvements in the last releases
seem to be inspired by Clang and GCC has finally added Plugin support.

~~~
keithwinstein
I'm not really an expert, but my understanding is that the perception from the
Apple side is that GCC was basically ok, and they were happy to contribute to
it, until the FSF switched to GPL3, which they view as freetard nonsense and
totally unacceptable to their needs.

My understanding is that the perception from the GNU side is that everything
was great and productive with Red Hat, IBM, Apple, etc. all contributing
together to one compiler, and then because of Apple's misguided objections to
GPL3 and GNU, Apple decided to take its marbles and go home and start funding
and working on a new compiler suite. Now we have some companies contributing
to GCC and others to LLVM/Clang and there is a lot of over-the-top criticism
of GCC. I assume the GCC people also wish they still had all the resources
they used to have.

That's why I get the sense the competition is not so friendly.

~~~
alanzeino
While I don't discount that perhaps GPLv3 was in fact the reason Apple broke
free; for the most part every talk I've seen an Apple engineer (or Google,
since they contribute too) give hasn't mentioned the GPL issue.

~~~
Someone
Naturally, engineers talk about engineering, not about politics. What the
companies think, I do not know. Has anybody ever asked the likes of Apple,
Google, or Adobe whether licensing was a decisive factor in choosing to work
on LLVM/Clang?

My guess would be that the choice would have gone the same way if gcc were BSD
(although then, Clang might have been a gcc fork), but that it did not help
that it was GPL, as their lawyers could not guarantee that incorporating GPL
in their libraries would be possible without releasing them as GPL. I would
not blame them, as there is little jurisprudence related to that issue, and
certainly no worldwide agreement.

~~~
Arelius
> Clang might have been a gcc fork

I feel the most fundamental motivating factor for the llvm project was Clang.

The gcc code generator could be improved, but is fundamentally usable for all
things it needs to be used for. But the static analysis that Apple wants to do
really is fundamentally incomparable with gcc.

~~~
gillianseed
>I feel the most fundamental motivating factor for the llvm project was Clang.

eeh? iirc LLVM precludes Clang by atleast 5 years and LLVM was initially
created to replace GCC's backend while using it's frontend (in fact during
most of it's lifetime LLVM has relied entirely on GCC as a frontend and it
still uses it through the dragonegg GCC plugin).

~~~
Arelius
This is true in actual functionality. But Apple's motivation for contributing
to llvm has certainly been to replace the entire gcc toolchain from day one.
It was just clear that having a new backend was going to be required to do
that, and also a bit easier to implement in the beginning. Apple would have
little to no interest in llvm if the plan wasn't to completely replace gcc
from the beginning.

~~~
gillianseed
>Apple would have little to no interest in llvm if the plan wasn't to
completely replace gcc from the beginning.

Sure, I have no doubt that Apple's sponsoring/stewardship of llvm is entirely
fueled by them wanting a full toolchain which they can incorporate into their
proprietary solutions and Clang is obviously a result of that (it's
functionality reflects exactly what Apple want, C, C++ and ObjC support).

That said llvm was already 5 years into the making when Apple came and hired
Chris Lattner (one of the original creators of llvm) so they have no say on
the initial aim of the project which again was to be a backend replacement for
gcc.

------
kingkilr
Dumb question, is there a way to verify if a given commit is in a GCC release?
Specifically, I'm interested in r181014.

~~~
mattparlane
This:

<http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=50693>

seems to be the specific issue, and it says it was fixed in 4.6.1.

~~~
kingkilr
That wasn't fixed in 4.6.1, I filed the issue against 4.6.1 :)

~~~
mattparlane
Ah sorry, teach me to try to be clever... :)

It appears that the Changelog was modified thusly:

[https://github.com/mirrors/gcc/commit/63f5ad449bbe0a4d478ae9...](https://github.com/mirrors/gcc/commit/63f5ad449bbe0a4d478ae9412461e204533a6206#diff-0)

I guess you could just download the source and see if it's in there.

EDIT: It is not.

------
KaeseEs
Am I imagining things or has there been an increase in the frequency of
releases of gcc (I understand that this is a bugfix point release) since clang
started to become popular?

~~~
drv
You can see the release history at <http://gcc.gnu.org/releases.html>

Here's number of releases per year (from all branches):

    
    
      - 2011: 6
      - 2010: 7
      - 2009: 5
      - 2008: 5
      - 2007: 5
      - 2006: 4
      - 2005: 6
      - 2004: 7
      - 2003: 5
      - 2002: 5
    

So at a high level, it doesn't look like the GCC release frequency has changed
much in the last decade.

------
crististm
I don't know about bug-fixes but for me 4.5.3 (probably also 4.4 but I can't
say for sure) had some regressions on athlon-xp. On a machine that passes
memtest over night and almost never gives me any problems with code compiled
with 3.6 and 4.1 - 4.5.3 segfaults randomly when building itself on the second
stage (after bootstraping).

4.3 seems to generate stable code and I'll stick to it for a while.

I started noticing problems when recent 32bit images from ubuntu and gentoo
freezed the PC.

~~~
ruediger
Did you report that? It seems you should rather discuss that on the gcc
mailinglists with the gcc developers.

~~~
crististm
To answer your question: not yet.

I've seen similar reports as mine but not that many. Athlon-xp is not exactly
new and few people use it to even care to report problems (specially when
random segfaults are mostly associated with hw). On the other hand ruling out
hw problems took me several weeks of rebuilds and before reporting I'd like to
test also the vanilla sources (the ones from gentoo are patched)

