Even the Advogato server has been having problems lately! The result is that I've not been able to post diary entries for around a week now. (Not that I have anything insanely useful or profoundly interesting to say, but still...)
The following is what I intended to post around a week ago:
GCC Gets Tree-SSA
After almost 4 years of development, the tree-ssa project has finally been merged into the GCC mainline!
The Static Single Assignment (SSA) form enables all sorts of funky optimisations to be implemented in GCC, making it possible for it to compete effectively with commercial optimising compilers.
Thanks in large part to Jeff Sturm and Andrew Haley, GCJ starts off as a first class citizen in this new avatar of GCC, that too with no libjava testsuite regressions. In fact, the Jacks testsuite now shows 30 unexpected successes (XPASSes) with GCJ and only 5 new failures (FAILs)!
The GCC bootstrap time seems to have regressed by around 20% percent, but one should not forget that quite a bit of new code has been added, not to mention the increased number of Trees that are created and the now redundant RTL optimisers.
And oh, by the way, say "Hello!" to Tree Browser!
ELF DSOs
"How to Write Shared Libraries" (PDF) is a paper by Ulrich Drepper that should be mandatory reading for every serious UNIX programmer. If nothing else, it lets one throw terms around like GOT and PLTs at newbies! ;-)