[ale] A new project to merge the existing GCC forks (fwd)

[Omar Loggiodice]

Hi Folks,

   Read the attached email, it relates to a new GCC development project.
Many gcc developers have been frustrated with the length of time that it is
taking to release gcc, and also the time it takes to get patches into
the FSF tree.

   The egcs project was started by several of these developers, including
most of the major contributors to the gcc project from Cygnus and all around
the net. I've been on the egcs list since it started (mid August), and the
activity and developments have been great! For example, member templates
support (for those of you that work with C++) is included in the latest
snapshot of egcs.

There is not a production release of egcs yet, but if you like the bleeding
edge you can grab the snapshots from ftp://ftp.cygnus.com/pub/egcs make sure
you read through the egcs archives/web site/list first! (I don't recommend
you get the snapshots unless you're a developer and are interested in 
playing around with versions of libc/glibc and/or patches!!)

BTW, HJ Lu and Ulrich Drepper are heavily involved in this project also
(they both have been doing most of the work on libc and glibc for a long time).

If you're interested, join the mailing list and make a contribution!

   
D.V. Henkel-Wallace Writes :
:From gcc2-request at cygnus.com  Fri Aug 15 19:53:14 1997
:Message-Id: <v02140b24b01a9457160e@[10.0.0.3]>
:Mime-Version: 1.0
:Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
:Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 16:31:29 -0700
:To: gcc2 at cygnus.com
:From: gumby at cygnus.com (D.V. Henkel-Wallace)
:Subject: A new project to merge the existing GCC forks
:Cc: egcs at cygnus.com
:
:A bunch of us (including Fortran, Linux, Intel and RTEMS hackers) have
:decided to start a more experimental development project, just like
:Cygnus and the FSF started the gcc2 project about 6 years ago.  Only
:this time the net community with which we are working is larger!  We
:are calling this project 'egcs' (pronounced 'eggs').
:
:Why are we doing this?  It's become increasingly clear in the course
:of hacking events that the FSF's needs for gcc2 are at odds with the
:objectives of many in the community who have done lots of hacking and
:improvment over the years.  GCC is part of the FSF's publicity for the
:GNU project, as well as being the GNU system's compiler, so stability
:is paramount for them.  On the other hand, Cygnus, the Linux folks,
:the pgcc folks, the Fortran folks and many others have done
:development work which has not yet gone into the GCC2 tree despite
:years of efforts to make it possible.
:
:This situation has resulted in a lot of strong words on the gcc2
:mailing list which really is a shame since at the heart we all want
:the same thing: the continued success of gcc, the FSF, and Free
:Software in general.  Apart from ill will, this is leading to great
:divergence which is increasingly making it harder for us all to work
:together -- It is almost as if we each had a proprietary compiler!
:Thus we are merging our efforts, building something that won't damage
:the stability of gcc2, so that we can have the best of both worlds.
:
:As you can see from the list below, we represent a diverse collection
:of streams of GCC development.  These forks are painful and waste
:time; we are bringing our efforts together to simplify the development
:of new features.  We expect that the gcc2 and egcs communities will
:continue to overlap to a great extent, since they're both working on
:GCC and both working on Free Software.  All code will continue to be
:assigned to the FSF exactly as before and will be passed on to the
:gcc2 maintainers for ultimate inclusion into the gcc2 tree.
:
:Because the two projects have different objectives, there will be
:different sets of maintainers.  Provisionally we have agreed that Jim
:Wilson is to act as the egcs maintainer and Jason Merrill as the
:maintainer of the egcs C++ front end.  Craig Burley will continue to
:maintain the Fortran front end code in both efforts.
:
:What new features will be coming up soon?  There is such a backlog of
:tested, un-merged-in features that we have been able to pick a useful
:initial set:
:
:    New alias analysis support from John F. Carr.
:    g77 (with some performance patches).
:    A C++ repository for G++.
:    A new instruction scheduler from IBM Haifa.
:    A regmove pass (2-address machine optimizations that in future
:                    will help with compilation for the x86 and for now
:                    will help with some RISC machines).
:
:This will use the development snapshot of 3 August 97 as its base --
:in other words we're not starting from the 18 month old gcc-2.7
:release, but from a recent development snapshot with all the last 18
:months' improvements, including major work on G++.
:
:We plan an initial release for the end of August.  The second release
:will include some subset of the following:
:  global cse and partial redundancy elimination.
:  live range splitting.
:  More features of IBM Haifa's instruction scheduling,
:      including software pipelineing, and branch scheduling.
:  sibling call opts.
:  various new embedded targets.
:  Further work on regmove.
:The egcs mailing list at cygnus.com will be used to discuss and
:prioritize these features.
:
:How to join: send mail to egcs-request at cygnus.com.  That list is
:under majordomo.
:
:We have a web page that describes the various mailing lists and has
:this information at: http://www.cygnus.com/egcs.
:
:Alternatively, look for these releases as they spread through other
:projects such as RTEMS, Linux, etc.
:
:Come join us!
:David Henkel-Wallace
:(for the egcs members, who currently include, among others):
: Per Bothner
: Joe Buck
: Craig Burley
: John F. Carr
: Stan Cox
: David Edelsohn
: Kaveh R. Ghazi
: Richard Henderson
: David Henkel-Wallace
: Gordon Irlam
: Jakub Jelinek
: Kim Knuttila
: Gavin Koch
: Jeff Law
: Marc Lehmann
: H.J. Lu
: Jason Merrill
: Michael Meissner
: David S. Miller
: Toon Moene
: Jason Molenda
: Andreas Schwab
: Joel Sherrill
: Ian Lance Taylor
: Jim Wilson
:
:


-- 
____________________________________________________________________
            /   __  __  __  - __  __ / - _  __  ologgio at vrainn.com
  Omar R.  /__ /_/ /_/ /_/ / /_/ /_/ / /_  /-_  CIS: 74040,1543
                  __/ __/                         
___C++/6_yrs____Virtual Reality/4_yrs____Vorl_____Linux(free)_______
Yes, I will retire in a room full of computers <grin>