Thank you for your thoughtful and patient reply. I should probably
apologize for the strident tone of my first letter to this mailing list.
It reflects a decades-long frustration with the trends in the computer
industry, rather than a specific critique of ggc development itself. Gcc
is a wonderful compiler, and has done a lot for the liberation of
programming from proprietary shackles. I am in awe of what its
developers have accomplished.
On Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:50:11 -0400, Daniel Berlin wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 2:30 PM, Hendrik Boom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
>>
>> There are a number of languages that would probably be better-suited to
>> programming gcc than C or C++, on technical grounds alone.
>
>
> That's great.
> We have more than just technical concerns.
I agree.
>
>> But if it is a requirement for using a language that everyone
>> already knows it, we will forever be doomed to C and its insecure
>> brethren.
>>
> This has never been listed as a requirement. It is certainly a
> consideration.
> The main requirement for communities like GCC for something like
> changing languages is consensus or at least a large set of active
> developers willing to do something and the rest of them willing to not
> commit suicide if it happens.
> There are secondary requirements like "not stalling for years while
> moving languages", "not losing serious performance", etc.
>
> You are free to propose whatever language you like. It is unlikely you
> will get support from any of the active contributors simply saying we
> should use X because Y.
> The best way to show us the advantages of using some other languages is
> to convert some part of GCC to use it and show how much better it is.
>
> This is a big job, of course. Then again, tree-ssa was started by diego
> as a side project, and gained supporters and helpers as others decided
> to spend their time on it.
> You may find the same thing, in which case you may find it is not hard
> to convince people to move to some other language. You may find nobody
> agrees with you, even after seeing parts of gcc in this new language.
> I can guarantee you you will find nobody agrees with you if you sit on
> the sidelines and do nothing but complain.
>
> --Dan
I first started using C and Algol 68 in 1975 -- C on a PDP-11, and Algol
68 on a CDC Cyber. Without doubt, Algol 68 was a better language for
most programming, but its operating environment (the NOS operating
system) was so hostile that I preferred the PDP-11 (with Unix). It has
been the Unix operating system that has carried C to the ubiquitous
presence it has today.
C is a 30-year-old language. Most people adopt C nowadays because
everyone else is using it, even though there are much better 20-year-old
languages available. I've spent years of my life tracking down dangling
pointers in other people's C code while hired to do development on
existing projects, all the while remembering that the first program I
wrote in Algol 68 was over a thousand lines long, contained complicated
data structures, and ran correctly the first time it passed through the
compiler without compile-time diagnostics.
Don't get me wrong. I can write C. I can write C++. I've even written
a substantial part of a C++ implementation in C++.
That said, I understand the inertia of an existing code base. Gcc is as
much the victim of the curse of compatibility as a multitude of other
projects. C++ is a big improvement over C, if you can restrict yourself
to a comprehensible subset (as you are apparently attempting to do). And
it has, qua inertia, the enormous advantage that it's possible to
incrementally move a large project from C to C++.
But I am still frustrated by the enormous pain the industry inflict on
itself by persisting is using such flawed tools for new projects.
-- hendrik
