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Date:      Sun, 1 Sep 2002 07:41:24 -0500
From:      leimy2k@mac.com
To:        Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
Cc:        obrien@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG, Alexander Langer <alex@big.endian.de>, Gerald Pfeifer <pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at>
Subject:   Re: gcc 3.1 / streambuf.h broken with "using namespace std;"
Message-ID:  <1FFDCCFF-BDA8-11D6-9DF6-0003937E39E0@mac.com>
In-Reply-To: <3D714B7F.CE386B65@mindspring.com>

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On Saturday, August 31, 2002, at 06:04 PM, Terry Lambert wrote:

> David O'Brien wrote:
>>> Because rather than leaving it alone for a while, they are already
>>> planning a 3.3.  8-).
>>>
>>> And comments on this list to that effect.
>>
>> I don't follow.  The GCC group branches previous to a release and 
>> makes
>> an initial + point releases from it.
>
> I thought it was the general consensus that the 3.1 version of
> the compiler was broken, and generated bad code, and that the 3.2
> compiler had a lot of these problems corrected, but destroyed
> binary compatability with 3.1.
>

Yes but if you go through and read gcc.gnu.org you will see that 3.2 
can be configured on linux to use the "multi-vendor ABI standard".  
Actually they have been trying to make this work all along and is 
probably why they break ABI compatibility.   3.1 has issues with 
template classes that use functions containing static variables [at 
least a pre-release of it did on Darwin/OS X].  This kind of bug made 
3.2 necessary for some people [though I hope every time the fix 
something that their test-cases increases by one.... that would be 
smart anyway].

3.2 is the "more confident" ABI and while there are no guarantees that 
3.3 will work with 3.2... there seems to be better feelings about it.


> I guess the fear is that, if they are willing to destroy binary
> compatability between point releases, with another point release
> in the wings, it would be risky to pick the point release one
> behind to standardise upon.
>

There will hopefully always be "one behind".... its called progress.  
They haven't implemented "export" yet so they don't have a 100% 
compliant C++ compiler yet either...  no reason to stop.


> It was my understanding that FreeBSD 5.0 release was not going
> to be GCC 3.3 (because GCC 3.3 would not be released in time for
> FreeBSD to not be "pulling a RedHat" if they shipped a beta and
> called it 3.3) , might be GCC 3.2, and was currently down-rev
> from there.
>

RedHat actually created a release that never occurred [2.96] in the gcc 
release chain... and if you use it, its actually a pretty nice 
compiler.... I know the ABI doesn't work with anything but 2.96 though.

>
>> How is this different from FreeBSD?
>> (other than they branch much before the .0 release and we don't).
>
> FreeBSD has been been branched for 18 months before the 5.0 release;
> what are you talking about?!?  There's not much more "much" than
> that, in the entire history of GCC.

I thought the comparison was pretty clear myself...   FreeBSD current 
is branched from the same CVS then worked on... the STABLE folks don't 
usually start whining about all the stuff that's going to be broken for 
them .... maybe not until DP2 anyway. :)


>
> -- Terry
>
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