Thanks to all who participated in the GCC Release Manager Q&A on IRC earlier today. Joseph Myers logged the chat session and will put it on the GCC Wiki soon. There were a lot of good comments and questions.
Thanks especially to Richard Guenther and Joseph Myers who both accommodated my unilateral setting of the schedule for the chat. Unfortunately, Jakub had a conflict and could not attend. The consensus seemed to be that this was a useful discussion, so we will do it again in a month or two; I will announce a date soon. The issue of using C++ to build GCC itself came up again in the discussion. Although there is certainly not unanimity, there seems to be an overall consensus in the GCC developer community that limited use of C++ would be beneficial. That consensus was present today on IRC, present in previous email discussions on this list, and present at the GCC Summits over the past two years. Therefore, I've asked the SC for permission to do require a C++98 host compiler to build GCC. Once that permission has been obtained, we can then work on what coding standards are appropriate. My expectation is that we will limit use of C++ features at first quite strictly; for example, we might forbid use of virtual functions, or multiple inheritance, or overloading. But, we'll take advantage of some obvious benefits, like use of std::vector in lieu of VEC.h. I will report further once the SC discussion has reached a conclusion. -- Mark Mitchell CodeSourcery m...@codesourcery.com (650) 331-3385 x713
