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I never said that GCC hasn't been widely used, nor did I suggest that it isn't widely used today, or anything like that. Of course it has had a big impact. I j

by Pacabel 12y ago

I never said that GCC hasn't been widely used, nor did I suggest that it isn't widely used today, or anything like that. Of course it has had a big impact. I just see its impact as diminishing these days. An award like this would have been more deserved in the mid-2000s, after it had successfully recovered from the struggles of the late 1990s, and when we did see significant improvements with the releases of GCC 3.x and 4.x.

_delirium 12y ago
Well, they only instituted this particular award in 2010, which probably impacts the choices. The four winners have been LLVM (2010), GHC (2011), Jikes (2012), Coq (2013), and GCC (2014): http://www.sigplan.org/Awards/Software/Main http://www.sigplan.org/Awards/Software/Main It's hard to tell from that list if the SIGPLAN award will end up being more retrospectively oriented, but a lot of ACM awards are. For example the Software Systems award does sometimes go to contemporary systems (LLVM won in 2012), but also some that are hard to justify except based on retrospective impact (Make won in 2003, Eiffel in 2006): http://awards.acm.org/software_system/year.cfm http://awards.acm.org/software_system/year.cfm I think in practice the decision process often ends up being: did anything come up in the past year or two that's really great? If so, give them the award. If not, look back for something older and influential that hasn't won yet.