Re: GCC 3.5 Status (2004-08-29)

["Giovanni Bajo" <giovannibajo@libero.it>]

Mark Mitchell wrote:

> If people want to put GCC 3.5 off until next
> June, and SC approves, it's OK with me.

I think this should be seriously considered. Given the large number of
incomplete projects (partly merged like the vectorizer, or being worked on
offline), and the fact that we are currently maintaing *two* stable release
branches, I don't think we should *rush* at releasing 3.5. Waiting another 6
months could be a good compromise. What do others think about this?

> Otherwise, I think we
> proceed, and accept that the release will be useful to some people
> and less useful to others.  (It will, for example, be useful to
> people who need support for new targets, or want gfortran, or want
> faster non-optimizing compile times, which we are now seeing for some
> C++ programs.)

As for C++ programs, I would like to remember that when tree-ssa was merged,
there were big C++ compile time issues at -O0, which used to be in the merge
requirement list, but were not met. There was agreement that these would be
tackled after the merge, possibly by running a couple of cleanup optimization
passes (DCE/CCP). I never heard of this project again since then, and the
issues seems to have been forgotten. I am sure I am not the only one who cares
about C++ compilation times at -O0: we got substantially better with 3.4 (even
wrt 2.95), but now we are regressing way too much.

IMHO, bugs like PR 15678 (C) and PR 13776 (C++) should be showstoppers for
branching 3.5.

Giovanni Bajo