GCC 2.0 released

People have been waiting for GCC 2.0 for a year. Now it's available for
anonymous ftp from /pub/gnu/gcc-2.0.tar.Z on prep.ai.mit.edu. There are
no diffs from version 1--such diffs would be too large to be useful.




Version 2 of GCC can generate code for the IBM PC/RT, the IBM RS/6000, the
Motorola 88000, the Acorn RISC machine (not fully tested), the AMD 29000
and the HP-PA (700 or 800), in addition to several machines supported by
version 1 (Motorola 68000, Vax, Sparc, National Semiconductor 32000, Intel
386 and 860, and Mips). Ports for the IBM 370, the Intel 960, the
Clipper, the Tron (a Japanese standard computer architecture) and the
NCUBE are on their way, but there is no estimate of when they will be
available. Note that using GCC to compile for the HP-PA requires as yet
unreleased versions of other GNU software such as the assembler and
linker.


Version 2 can generate output files in a.out, COFF, ECOFF, ELF, XCOFF,
VAX-VMS and OSF-Rose formats when used with a suitable assembler. It can
produce debugging information in several formats: BSD stabs, COFF, ECOFF,
ECOFF with stabs symbols, VAX-VMS and DWARF. (We may support XCOFF for
the RS/6000 in the future.)


Version 2 can be easily configured as a cross-compiler, running on one
platform while generating code for another.


Version 2 supports compatible calling conventions for function calling and
return values on the Sparc (unlike version 1) as well as the other machine
types.


Early testing of GCC Version 2.0 indicates that it produces faster code
for SPARC computers than Sun's latest released compilers (both bundled and
unbundled). It is also the fastest known compiler for the Motorola 88k.




In addition to ANSI C, GCC Version 2.0 includes support for the C++ and
Objective C languages. Objective C is an object-oriented language which
adds to C features similar to Smalltalk. The front end for the Objective
C language was donated by NeXT Computers, Inc., which uses GCC as the
basis for their NeXTstep operating system. (Run-time support for the
Objective C language is still under development.)


GCC extends the C language to support nested functions, non-local gotos,
taking the address of program labels, and unnamed structures as function
arguments (among other things). There are also many new warnings for
frequent programming mistakes.


GCC Version 2 can produce position-independent code for several types of
CPU: 68000, 88000, 80386, Sparc, and RS/6000. Supporting PIC on
additional suitable CPU types is not too difficult a task.
--

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