On Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 9:07 AM, Ian Lance Taylor <i...@google.com> wrote: > 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
Ian, Thank you for your response! I don't think that there has to be controversy to be interesting. Obviously that split/reunification was important, but I think that there might even be some value in documenting the minutia of the project's growth. In other words, what was the process for incorporating each new version of the C++ standard? Who and why did GCC start a frontend for X language? Things like that. Thanks again for your response! Will
