Brooks Moses <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Indeed. It would be interesting to confirm whether or not a copy of > gcc bootstrapped with a non-gcc compiler matched byte-for-byte with a > copy of gcc bootstrapped from gcc. Not so much to look for > intentional things like this, but to see whether the bootstrapping > actually does achieve its goal of obtaining a result that's > independent of the bootstrapping compiler. Has anyone actually tried > it?
At Cygnus, in the early and mid- 90s, we did this routinely, starting with the native compilers shipped with various Unix variants. As Unix variants generally no longer come with a free (as in beer) compiler other than gcc, this is harder to test today. Still, not too hard: you would just start with some other free compiler. Ian