------- Comment #3 from steven at gcc dot gnu dot org 2006-01-08 17:35 ------- Re. #1, where you wrote: "What the using community needs are not arguments but continued use of working programs. Rewrites are OK when there are clear advantages in efficiency or less susceptibility to fraudulent use of existing code."
I don't want to get into this whole flame war any more than the others. But I do want to give you my view on these remarks. You clearly don't understand why g77 had to be rewritten, and you (and much of the rest of the "using community") also don't understand how GCC development works. So let me try to explain that first. If it were not for the efforts of a small number of Fortran *users*, there would not be a gfortran. I emphasize users here because all of us gfortran developers are Fortran users first, gfortran developers second. This rewrite has nothing to do with efficiency or improved support for the language. It was about making Fortran survive as a language supported by GCC. Most GCC developers don't care about Fortran at all. And quite understandably so: You get no money but tons of complaints for working on Fortran. The scientific community is a demanding miser. C and C++ are still the languages that much of the GCC community makes a living of. G77 was rotting and holding back GCC development. If G77 had not been rewritten, Fortran would probably have been dropped as a supported language in GCC 4.0. The people working on gfortran are Fortran users who understood that Fortran as a language would just be ditched from GCC altogether unless G77 would be rewriten from scratch. Literally all gfortran hackers are volunteers who don't get a penny for their work. What this development community does _not_ need is people like you who think it is OK to take our development effort and never contribute back anything other than complaints and insults. People making comments like yours are only going to make me (as one of the founders of the gfortran project) and others less willing to work on gfortran. The developers working on gfortran, and on gcc as a whole, try to do the best they can, but manpower is limited and all of us are volunteers. If what we create is not good enough, accept it and help make it better, or go buy a commercial compiler. -- http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=25705
