GCC quality (was Re: AMD-64 optimizations, some (new) code)

[Ashod Nakashian]

Torbjorn Granlund wrote:
> Alexander Kruppa <alexander.kruppa at mytum.de> writes:
> 
>   Torbjorn Granlund wrote:
>   
>   > I think you'll find that gcc 4.0.1 is a lot worse than 3.3.3.  It
>   > might be safer to upgrade to 3.3.6 (or whatever is the latest 3.3
>   > release).
>   
>   Torbjörn, what is your opinion on the 3.4.x version of gcc? Is it safe 
>   to use?

I'm quite surprised. 4.0 was supposedly well tested and most of the 
sources of old bugs were replaced with fresh code, also well designed 
and tested. I expected the 4th version to be much more stable than the 
now-old 3 version. I'm sure you know what you are talking about though, 
so I'll take your word.

>   
> I have had more problems with 3.4.x than with 3.3.x.  But with
> the track record of gcc, it is not safe to use any gcc release.

So 3.3.x is the most stable one?


By the way, the same problems you speak of are very serious issues in 
Intel's C++ compilers as well. In particular, I've written MP math 
function and when optimizations were enabled, Intel's generated binaries 
would simply either hang (at initialization, before calling main) or 
crash instanty. In some cases it would generate wrong code, by that was 
more rare than hangs and crashes. I've found these problems in at least 
7 and 8. In this respect version 6 is more stable than version 7 than 
version 8. I have version 9, but its requirements to install it are too 
much to pollute my workstation.

I thought it would be interesting to put a $400+ professional and 
commercial compiler in prespective with an open-source, FREE compiler.

-Ash