Re: [Mingw-users] mingw gcc 4.3 release?

[Brian Dessent <brian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lothar May wrote:

> I read on this list that some people are already compiling or trying to
> compile gcc 4.3 on mingw. I'd just like to know: Is there a release or
> technology preview "in sight"? I'd very much like to test it.

You can build 4.3 yourself if you want to test it.  It builds fine. 
That is not the issue.

> Also I'd like to know if there are any serious issues which prevent the
> current 4.x Technology Previews from going stable. It's somehow
> frustrating that some library vendors won't support it until it is stable.

The problem is that MinGW gcc releases contain a huge number of local
patches by Danny.  They are not just vanilla FSF releases.  The patches
fix a number of issues that aren't fixed upstream.  It's a ton of work
to maintain a local tree like that, and I wouldn't be surprised to find
that Danny finds it quite painful to make releases.

Of course, a great deal of the patchset in Danny's 4.2 release were
backports from 4.3: tlsemu, the w32-unwind.h support,
__register_frame_info crtstart/end stuff, type-generic math defines,
stdcall mangling fixes, ...  So it may be that 4.3 is closer to working
without a great deal of out of tree patches, but I'm positive some will
still be required.  For example, building shared libstdc++/libgcc/etc is
still borked.  That may not matter to you if you're only doing C, or
you're doing C++ without using exceptions, or you're using exceptions
but you don't care about throwing exceptions across DLLs.  But in terms
of calling it a "MinGW gcc" it doesn't really do anyone good to release
something that breaks in those corner cases, which is why 3.4.5 has hung
around for so long and newer releases are so agonizing to get out.

So the real issue is not that FSF gcc doesn't build or doesn't work, but
rather that vanilla FSF gcc has never been stable enough to call it the
system compiler, for either MinGW or Cygwin.

Brian

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