On Wed, 7 Sep 2005, Thomas Lord wrote:
This appears to be quite similar to the pattern that played out with GCC and its "friendly, experimental" fork, EGCS. The volunteer-managed FSF GCC progressed "too slowly" for businesses at the time and through a similar set of maneuvers, it was forked and then displaced. It was inconceivable to the commercial hackers I spoke with back then that what they were doing was wrong. They were sold on the idea that "progress" meant their businesses getting ahead as cheaply and as short-term-oriented as possible. The resulting dog-pile-on-the-code approach resulted, predictably, in a bloated monolith of a compiler and complete neglect of contemporaneous efforts to get compiler construction back on the track of producing simple, maintainable systems. Management oriented towards a slower growth path for those businesses and business units, marketing aimed at educating customers about why this was desirable -- those ideas were simply not on the table.
That's interesting information. But let say I also do have some experience with egcs/gcc these days at least from C++ user point of view and I can only add that I was happy like a small child trying egcs1.0.1 since it provided me with the C++ compiler which consumed _only_ about 30-40MB of RAM for compiling our project in comparison with gcc of these days which spent twice this amount. Note: 32MB RAM was quite a lot in 1996/7.
So thanks to egcs hackers I've been able to complete my school projects with much less pain.
Also the second note: current GCC release manager is doing good job IMHO provided as a commercial service by his small company to the big IT sponsor. I think this is also needed to note since every coin has two sides...
Cheers, Karel -- Karel Gardas [EMAIL PROTECTED] ObjectSecurity Ltd. http://www.objectsecurity.com _______________________________________________ Gnu-arch-users mailing list Gnu-arch-users@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-arch-users GNU arch home page: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnu-arch/
