opposition to LSB 2.0 rc1

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Thu, 29 Jul 2004, Benjamin Kosnik wrote:

>    However, the current FSF release of gcc is gcc-3.4.1, which is
>    incompatible with the older release series. This release provides
>    substantial benefits to users, including increased compiler and
>    runtime performance, increased conformance to C99 and C++
>    standards, and innovative new features.
> 
>    This page has the full details:
>    http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-3.4/changes.html

There are enough other good arguments that there's no need to make dubious
claims of "increased conformance to C99" to justify the benefits of 3.4.  
You will observe that gcc-3.3/c99status.html and gcc-3.4/c99status.html
are identical apart from the version number: there are no new C99 features
in 3.4.  Various technical conformance issues are improved, but some
regressions in c-decl.c were postponed to 3.5 so there isn't monotonic
improvement either.

Even 3.4 doesn't implement the standard C++ ABI fully correctly
<http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-07/msg00138.html>.  (This is apart from
the "cannot be mangled due to a defect in the C++ ABI" cases, but those
don't cause binary compatibility problems between releases, just failures
to compile in the problem cases.)

-- 
Joseph S. Myers               http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/
    jsm@polyomino.org.uk (personal mail)
    jsm28@gcc.gnu.org (Bugzilla assignments and CCs)