Dave Korn wrote:
On 23 June 2007 22:53, Brooks Moses wrote:
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?
That's kinda the whole point of bootstrapping :) any variation is in the
stage1 compiler only, modulo such bad bugs in the native compiler that the
stage1 gcc miscompiles stage2 gcc.
Right, exactly. I'm an engineer; you give me a theory like that, and I
become curious how much it's been tested in practice. :)
- Brooks
