GNU C,G++ for RS/6000

John Wroclawski jtw at lcs.mit.edu
Fri Jun 7 06:13:39 AEST 1991


In article <7749 at spdcc.SPDCC.COM> rbraun at spdcc.COM (Rich Braun) writes:

   From: rbraun at spdcc.COM (Rich Braun)
   Date: 6 Jun 91 17:49:47 GMT

   The Free Software Foundation has stated in no uncertain
   terms that the RS/6000 won't be supported until gcc version 2.0 comes
   out, which is obviously months or years in the future (this is due to a
   spat between IBM and the FSF; IBM is worried about "contaminating" its
   code with copylefted sources, so it refused to make some FSF software
   available to its customers--that's how I remember the episode).

Say what? I'd imagine the primary reasons for not supporting the
RS/6000 in gcc 1.x are a) gcc1 doesn't have the ability to do
instruction scheduling for superscalar processors well, while gcc2
does, and b) gcc2 is close enough that it doesn't make a whole lot of
sense to put effort into a gcc1 port, specially given that gcc2 will
be able to generate much better code for this particular machine.

Once long ago IBM decided to not ship gnu emacs with a product after
saying they would because the folks who sell another emacs claimed, in
the interim, that gnu emacs used some of their code. In fact, Stallman
appears to have had permission from the original author of that code
to use it; in any event the code in question since been completely
rewritten. None of this past history has anything to do with gcc.



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