On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 10:53 PM, Will Hawkins <wh...@virginia.edu> wrote: > > My name is Will Hawkins and I am a longtime user of gcc and admirer of > the project. I hope that this is the proper forum for the question I > am going to ask. If it isn't, please accept my apology and ignore me. > > I am a real geek and I love the history behind open source projects. > I've found several good resources about the history of "famous" open > source projects and organizations (including, but definitely not > limited to, the very interesting Free as in Freedom 2.0). > > Unfortunately there does not appear to be a good history of the > awesome and fundamental GCC project. I know that there is a page on > the wiki (https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/History) but that is really the > best that I can find. > > Am I missing something? Are there good anecdotes about the history of > the development of GCC that you think I might find interesting? Any > pointers would be really great! > > Thanks for taking the time to read my questions. Thanks in advance for > any information that you have to offer. I really appreciate everyone's > effort to make such a great compiler suite. It's only with such a > great compiler that all our other open source projects are able to > succeed!
There is some history and links at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection . In my opinion, the history of GCC is not really one of drama or even anecdotes, except for the EGCS split. There are plenty of people who work on GCC out of personal interest, but for decades now the majority of work on GCC has been by people paid to work on it. I expect that the result is less interesting as history and more interesting as software. Ian
