On Sat, Aug 05, 2000 at 10:02:23PM -0500, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 05, 2000 at 07:25:41PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > libraries and tools are better than the vendor counterparts; Sun's
> > compilers and linkers are considerably better than GNU's for SPARC C code,
> > for example.
>
> Likewise for Digital/Compaq. gcc's Alpha code generation and optimization
> is really inferior.
I don't doubt this in the least, but I still use GCC on SPARC systems
and would be reluctant to buy a system with a poor GCC port. If you
want my business, work on the GCC port for your system, not some lousy
proprietary compiler. It's not even about politics. I'd take a good,
portable, proprietary compiler if it gave me all the benefits of GCC
and more. Similary for linkers and libraries.
I am furthermore *not* suggesting dropping support for non-Unix or
non-GCC platforms. I am merely saying that that is not where our
focus should be.
Cheers
-John
