GCC moves to C++ implementation.
Heater.
Posts: 21,230
Seems that with the 4.8 release GCC has been reimplemented in C++.
Does that mean that the propgcc team has to start over if they want to keep up with the GCC folks?
Does it mean GCC v4.6 will live on as a branch implemented in C forever? There must be a lot of little branches out the like propgcc or zpugcc and so on that may never catch up.
Is using C++ a good idea for GCC? Which after all is a C compiler at heart and C++ has grown into an unintelligible mess of a language.
What does it all mean?
Does that mean that the propgcc team has to start over if they want to keep up with the GCC folks?
Does it mean GCC v4.6 will live on as a branch implemented in C forever? There must be a lot of little branches out the like propgcc or zpugcc and so on that may never catch up.
Is using C++ a good idea for GCC? Which after all is a C compiler at heart and C++ has grown into an unintelligible mess of a language.
What does it all mean?
Comments
Not the whole thing! Unless I'm mistaken, starting with 4.8 GCC requires C++ to compile it. That just means that some of the new features in 4.8 (and a few older features that have been ported over) are written in C++, and so require a C++ compiler. I'm pretty sure the bulk of GCC is still plain C code and the platform dependent code is still the same.
The PropGCC project hardly had to touch the platform independent part of GCC (I think we made one small change to one file to correct a compile error with recent compilers). Porting the Propeller specific part from 4.6 to 4.8 should be very straightforward, and is in fact one of the things on my "todo" list.
Eric
Is it so that C++ finally reached sufficient standardization/stability to do this? Seems like only yesterday that I had big problems getting C++ to compile on all the different platforms we had to support, from Windows through Linux to VxWorks and others. Never mind our source code portability, the compilers would crash trying to deal with it.