5 ms·

GCC 4.6.3 Released

67 points by voodoochilo 15y ago

KaeseEs 15y ago
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?
- Arelius 15y ago
  The actual count of releases hasn't been much higher than normal. But recently a number of previously more experimental or controversial features have been released. IMO, the main one that likely wouldn't have been released without the Clang/LLVM pressure is the plugin interface that has been around in branches for many years.
- drv 15y ago
  You can see the release history at http://gcc.gnu.org/releases.html 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.
- stephen_g 15y ago
  I don't think it has (or will) make a huge difference - gcc has always been competing with commercial compilers (and to a lesser extent, open source compilers like pcc) so it's never really had much of a reason to stagnate.
keithwinstein 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      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.
      - wmf 15y ago
        It could be embarrassing to admit that you're duplicating a huge amount of effort for essentially non-technical reasons.
      - Someone 15y ago
        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.
kingkilr 15y ago
Dumb question, is there a way to verify if a given commit is in a GCC release? Specifically, I'm interested in r181014.
- mattparlane 15y ago
  This: http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=50693 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 15y ago
    That wasn't fixed in 4.6.1, I filed the issue against 4.6.1 :)
    - mattparlane 15y ago
      Ah sorry, teach me to try to be clever... :) It appears that the Changelog was modified thusly: https://github.com/mirrors/gcc/commit/63f5ad449bbe0a4d478ae9412461e204533a6206#diff-0 https://github.com/mirrors/gcc/commit/63f5ad449bbe0a4d478ae9... I guess you could just download the source and see if it's in there. EDIT: It is not.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
crististm 15y ago
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 15y ago
  Did you report that? It seems you should rather discuss that on the gcc mailinglists with the gcc developers.
  - crististm 15y ago
    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)

67 points by voodoochilo 15y ago

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?

Arelius 15y ago
The actual count of releases hasn't been much higher than normal. But recently a number of previously more experimental or controversial features have been released. IMO, the main one that likely wouldn't have been released without the Clang/LLVM pressure is the plugin interface that has been around in branches for many years.
drv 15y ago
You can see the release history at http://gcc.gnu.org/releases.html 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.
stephen_g 15y ago
I don't think it has (or will) make a huge difference - gcc has always been competing with commercial compilers (and to a lesser extent, open source compilers like pcc) so it's never really had much of a reason to stagnate.

keithwinstein 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
    - wmf 15y ago
      It could be embarrassing to admit that you're duplicating a huge amount of effort for essentially non-technical reasons.
    - Someone 15y ago
      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.

kingkilr 15y ago

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

mattparlane 15y ago
This: http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=50693 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 15y ago
  That wasn't fixed in 4.6.1, I filed the issue against 4.6.1 :)
  - mattparlane 15y ago
    Ah sorry, teach me to try to be clever... :) It appears that the Changelog was modified thusly: https://github.com/mirrors/gcc/commit/63f5ad449bbe0a4d478ae9412461e204533a6206#diff-0 https://github.com/mirrors/gcc/commit/63f5ad449bbe0a4d478ae9... I guess you could just download the source and see if it's in there. EDIT: It is not.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

crististm 15y ago

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 15y ago
Did you report that? It seems you should rather discuss that on the gcc mailinglists with the gcc developers.
- crististm 15y ago
  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)