Another Slackware article marking 25 years
 

I enjoyed this article. :)

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/0..._of_a_century/

Just saw dugan's post. Sorry for the duplication. Moderators please feel free to lock or remove this post.

than I add this one, which is a german one, and the thread topic might fit again ;-)
https://www.pro-linux.de/news/1/2609...slackware.html

I was surprised reading the article that GCC was already on version 2.4.5 back when Slackware first came out. Version 5 only debuted in 2015, and now we're up to 8 already. I wonder what the reason is for the quick major version jumps in recent years.

since the implementation language for gcc is not longer C but C++, since 4.8, the code is more maintainable and development works faster :-)

but I guess that other factors also count, like more focus on C++ development. since ~ 2008, actually more early, but at least since 2008, (the free lunch is over) and where MS realized that C# is nice but in some areas C++ is the only option (since even C fails in some aspects on some problems) and than the upcoming modernization , C++11/14/17 upcoming 20, that are requested from the industry, a new dynamic in C++ compiler development is a fact.
the clang compiler, that is not just competition but also cooperation in some points, also accelerates the development.

and than there is a different versioning schema since some time, once a year a version pump ;-)

There was a revolution in the gcc project, starting with gcc 2.95.

gcc 2.x development was extremely conservative, to the point that developers and vendors were chafing under some legacy problems and resistance to new technologies which the old guard simply refused to do anything about.

A few gcc developers forked gcc into "egcs", which merged a few different experimental gcc forks and incorporated "radical" fixes and technologies. They originally intended it to be its own project, separate from gcc, but it was received with tremendous excitement by some prominent users/vendors. It started to look like there was going to be a shift away from gcc in favor of egcs.

Rather than risk irrelevance, the gcc dev leads decided to make egcs the new official gcc, the projects were merged, and that became the gcc 2.95 release, with gcc 3.0 coming soon after. The cabal of egcs developers took on leadership roles in the project.

Thereafter the bar of entry for "radical" changes was greatly lowered, and gcc saw large changes more frequently. Since the gcc team followed conventions similar to today's "semantic versioning", this resulted in more frequent major version bumps.

I was fortunate to be working at Cygnus Solutions as a junior gcc engineer at the time, which gave me a front row seat to the excitement. Cygnus employed some (all? not sure) of the egcs developers, like Jim Wilson, and was one of the vendors excited about switching over.

Very interesting. Thanks for the history lesson.

its here
https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/History

and here you can see that with 2015 the 'new major version every year' versioning started
https://gcc.gnu.org/develop.html

so gcc is currently on 8/9 while clang is on 6/7, might this be important or not (for some)

Excuse me, but looks like I missed something important. :D

Because I looked right now in the source code of gcc-8.1.1_20180626_r262159 from -current, and apparently here the GCC is still implemented in C, just like was since Ice Age.

Even the C++ compiler is still written in C and not C++.

Is that Patrick on the picture?

Nah. Our BDFL looks like in the attached imagine.

https://brainstormoverride.files.wor...12/patrick.jpg

It's from here:

https://www.shutterstock.com/image-p...7643&utm_term=

"Grandad transformed into bold teenager".

A very odd choice for an article photo, and an odd article title too [I don't understand the use of the term 'swinger' in this context]. Are all LinuXXX distros sharing code like car keys in a fruit bowl?

hm, you, of course, know it better than the GCC wiki and the GCC devs

https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.8/changes.html
see also
gcc.gnu.org/wiki/gcc-in-cxx

so, once again I fixed the mess and lies you write in threads I am involved, you next messages will be again ignored, it's not worth to read anything you write. :hattip:

This is too funy. :cool: