3 ms·

You all forgot something: on stability and speeds, Unix compilers rot over time. From 1996-1999, the stable choice on both speed and reliability was the GNU on

by anthk 3y ago

You all forgot something: on stability and speeds, Unix compilers rot over time. From 1996-1999, the stable choice on both speed and reliability was the GNU one. https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~blbowers/fuzz-2001.pdf https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~blbowers/fuzz-2001.pdf FVWM ran circles around MWM or CDE itself about speed. Rxvt was much lighter than an xterm, not everyone needed to plot Tek graphs. Even some late Irix users preferred JWM against the propietary options. Nowadays, GNU's the slight bloated one, being Guix the 'essential' GNU distro, making lots of 32 bit machines without SSD's a crawling nightmare to install.

nineteen999 3y ago
> From 1996-1999, the stable choice on both speed and reliability was the GNU one. Meh, gcc 2.8 was buggy as hell on Linux/i386 by around 1998, as was gcc 2.95 up to 2.95.3. The issues with it are what led to the egcs fork which eventually replaced the original gcc branch. So it wasn't all sunshine and roses.
- guenthert 3y ago
  I thought it was missing features in the C++ compiler and its less-than-perfectly-clear error messages which led to the split. The C compiler was pretty sound early on. Sure, occasionally there were bugs, but users, including Linus Torvalds, complained loudly about those, because expectations were already high.
- CalChris 3y ago
  EGCS was started because of Stallman. They refused to criticize him directly but it was clear from their Declaration of Independence email that it was Stallman. They even used its language but avoided Stallman’s name to make the eventual merge politically possible. https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/History#EGCS https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/History#EGCS
pjmlp 3y ago
Can't say much on that regard, because we only used GCC on Linux distributions, everywhere else it was the vendors C compilers. Interesting that you mention stability, exactly during the GCC vs egcs politics time frame.
- guenthert 3y ago
  I worked in a small shop in the late nineties where we used gcc during development within the MS Windows environment because MS' own compiler (Visual C++, iirc) produced either (depending on settings) no warnings or buried the relevant ones under those of questionable code in the system header files. We had to use MS's compiler for the final product, as gcc couldn't produce shared libraries in that environment at that time, otherwise we would have gladly used only gcc.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Anyone that tries to use UNIX stuff on non-UNIX OSes ends up having to deal with interoperability pains, hence why cygwin and mingw keep being leaky abstractions, regardless how much better GCC might generate raw code versus VC++. Additionally, nowadays clang also ships alongside VC++, and is offically supported by Microsoft as well.

by anthk 3y ago

nineteen999 3y ago

> From 1996-1999, the stable choice on both speed and reliability was the GNU one. Meh, gcc 2.8 was buggy as hell on Linux/i386 by around 1998, as was gcc 2.95 up to 2.95.3. The issues with it are what led to the egcs fork which eventually replaced the original gcc branch. So it wasn't all sunshine and roses.

guenthert 3y ago
I thought it was missing features in the C++ compiler and its less-than-perfectly-clear error messages which led to the split. The C compiler was pretty sound early on. Sure, occasionally there were bugs, but users, including Linus Torvalds, complained loudly about those, because expectations were already high.
CalChris 3y ago
EGCS was started because of Stallman. They refused to criticize him directly but it was clear from their Declaration of Independence email that it was Stallman. They even used its language but avoided Stallman’s name to make the eventual merge politically possible. https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/History#EGCS https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/History#EGCS

pjmlp 3y ago

Can't say much on that regard, because we only used GCC on Linux distributions, everywhere else it was the vendors C compilers. Interesting that you mention stability, exactly during the GCC vs egcs politics time frame.

guenthert 3y ago
I worked in a small shop in the late nineties where we used gcc during development within the MS Windows environment because MS' own compiler (Visual C++, iirc) produced either (depending on settings) no warnings or buried the relevant ones under those of questionable code in the system header files. We had to use MS's compiler for the final product, as gcc couldn't produce shared libraries in that environment at that time, otherwise we would have gladly used only gcc.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Anyone that tries to use UNIX stuff on non-UNIX OSes ends up having to deal with interoperability pains, hence why cygwin and mingw keep being leaky abstractions, regardless how much better GCC might generate raw code versus VC++. Additionally, nowadays clang also ships alongside VC++, and is offically supported by Microsoft as well.