15 Dec 2002
GCC 3.3
Yeah! GCC: GNU Compiler Collection has branched for 3.3. I am really excited since at least GNU gcj 3.3 is a big improvement over 3.2. And it opens the door for exciting new development for 3.4. GNU Classpath has implementations of java.awt, java.util.prefs and java.util.logging that are all waiting to be imported into the libgcj CVS tree. I have some ideas for sharing more of java.lang, java.io and java.net between Classpath and libgcj. And it will be fun to experiment with the new stack walking code that Andrew Haley made. But it also means a lot of extra work since a lot of people will now suddenly realize that they have to actually test this thing and they will find bugs that the regular developers thought didn’t exist anymore. And all bug fixes now have to be tested against two versions. Finding disk space for an extra build of gcc (almost 1 Gig when you have a source, build and install, and that is a build for only the C, C++ and Java compilers and libraries) was also fun (why-o-why did I ever think that having 6 partitions on each disk would be smart…) I also had to update my autobuilder to test both mainline and the 3.3 branch. Interesting 2 months ahead anyway.