I hope some ostriches get their heads out of the sand and take a look at the world around them. :-/
On my home PC, a "c,c++,java" bootstrap takes more than three hours and a complete testsuite run takes a lot of time as well. Considering that any change to the main compiler needs a complete bootstrap and testsuite run twice over (once without and once with your patch), that too in the best case of no regressions, is it small wonder that many people who might want to otherwise volunteer to help with GCC development just cannot afford to? I have only so much free time left after my job and my family and many a time I feel I am much better off reading a good book or watching a good movie, for example, than literally losing sleep over GCC. Small wonder then that almost all of the prolific contributors to GCC either work on it as a part of their job or on really fast machines with loads of memory (or both).
Perhaps it is not a good idea after all to have a single compiler codebase support so many languages and runtimes at the same time. Perhaps it would be better to start over by creating a well-defined (in terms of the structure and contract) set of language and platform-independent intermediate languages (different avatars of GENERIC and RTL) and have the front-ends and the back-ends as separate projects from the core framework. Of course, if things were this simple people would have done it already, but a man can dream, can't he?
Miscellany
QEMU 0.7.0 is available now.
"Fortress" (PDF) is a new language from Sun. (Yes, courtesy LtU once more.)
Needless to say, my interest in learning Qt has evaporated and so has my desire to create a native Java API viewer for Linux.
By the way, I found a nice set of slides explaining the Static Single Assigment (SSA) form here (PDF).
Lastly, GCC 4.0.0 has been released!
I think it is really weird that the specifications for C and C++ are not freely available and that you have to shell out moolah to get them from ISO. Every programming language meant for general developers must have its language specification freely available. On that count, Java fares much better and full marks to Sun for ensuring that.
Another very cool thing about BSNL's package is that you get a Huawei SmartAX MT880 ADSL modem-cum-router that has a built-in firewall and is rather cheap at Rs 2000/- for outright purchase. All you need is an Ethernet card. At the moment, the private operators are nowhere close to giving such a deal.
SRM-238 was only slightly less worse than SRM-236. Muddled thinking ("coder's block"?) once again ensured that I could solve only one of the problems in the given time. I really suck as a coder. I should also stop writing about SRMs.
Mark Wielaard has written a nice article on GCJ in LWN.net. I did not completely grok Nathan Myers's (ncm) problems with the design of the Java language as written in the comments section for that article. Ditto for Jamie Zawinski's problems with Java for that matter. I have a long way to go before I can even begin to understand some of the objections people have for the design of programming language.
It sucks big time that gtkhtml requires the whole GNOME schmear. Unwieldy dependencies seem to be the general rule in Gtk/GNOME-land. Time to learn Qt.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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