Re: maturity of the c++ compiler technology

Juergen Kahrs <jkahrs@castor.atlas.de> writes:


> An exercise to the reader: On page 46 of Bjarne S's book
> The C++ programming language (3.ed.) you find this simple program:
>
> http://www.research.att.com/~bs/hello_world.c
>
> Find a compiler which is able to produce an executable for this program.
> This is not as trivial as it looks at first sight (a hint: try the
> experimental egcs-2.91.66). Do not change a single byte of the source
> code. Why does gcc 2.7 not succeed ? Which two lines need changing
> before gcc 2.7 can compile it ? Why ? Can a language be called "stable"
> before there are stable (not experimental) compilers for the language ?


Gcc 2.7 is ancient history and has been obsolete for years, at least
for C++ programming. The current official stable release is
gcc-2.95.1, which you could have found by checking the web page at:


                http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/gcc.html


I believe the 'e' in "egcs" officially stood for "enhanced", not
"experimental", and in any case "experimental" referred to the
development model, not the compiler itself. For example, the egcs-1.1
announcement just says "EGCS is a free software project to further
the development of the GNU compilers using an open development
environment".


I didn't try 2.95.1, but I tried a pre-2.96 snapshot (from the cvs)
which compiles and runs your example with no problems.
--
--Per Bothner
bothner@pacbell.net per@bothner.com http://www.bothner.com/~per/

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