Message-ID: <41894F86.7070405@debian.org>
Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 22:37:10 +0100
From: "Giacomo A. Catenazzi" <cate@debian.org>
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To: Matti Aarnio <matti.aarnio@zmailer.org>
CC: Timothy Miller <miller@techsource.com>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: support of older compilers
References: <41894779.10706@techsource.com> <20041103211714.GP12275@mea-ext.zmailer.org>
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Matti Aarnio wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 04:02:49PM -0500, Timothy Miller wrote:
> 
>>I'm just curious about why there seems to be so much work going into 
>>supporting a wide range of GCC versions.  If people are willing to 
>>download and compile a new kernel (and migrating from 2.4 to 2.6 is 
>>non-trivial for some systems, like RH9), why aren't they willing to also 
>>download and build a new compiler?
> 
> 
> 
> How about those other architectures, than i386 ?
> Over the years I have learned, that while GCC may work OK in i386,
> the same version used in SPARC does produce bad code.  This has
> bitten me multiple times.
> 
> 
> We weird people of other architechtures do tend to get "somewhat"
> conservative over the years in finding, and finally staying with
> a compiler that we have learned to work.   Multiple burned,
> forever shy...

But is it Linux the biggest compiler bug finder?
So forcing a newer compiler in other architectures should
improve also the quality of code generation.

ciao
	cate
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