[geeks] GCC vs Sun Studio

[der Mouse]

>> The whole GNU autoconf mess really gets to me sometimes.  When it
>> works, it is wonderful.  When it breaks, it is the most
>> indecipherable mess I have ever seen.
> You can say that again repeatedly.

AOL.  It's also a security disaster waiting to happen - a many-kiloline
shellscript that compiles test programs is not something that is easy
to verify as free of trojan code.

> Personally, I'm looking forward to GCC 4.1.

I'm not.  The gcc people seem to have gotten into a mindset that says
that your standard libraries are not allowed to support extensions -
that is, that if the semantics of a call are not defined by the
standard, gcc may reasonably do anything.  This is very wrong, since it
makes it impossible to extend those calls by defining semantics for
some calls that the standard leaves undefined.  (I'm thinking im
particular of the way the printf->[f]puts transformation broke NetBSD;
the particular incident is not nearly as important as the principle and
mindset it illustrates.)

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