[HN Gopher] GCC 11.1 RC Released, GCC 12 in Development on Trunk
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       GCC 11.1 RC Released, GCC 12 in Development on Trunk
        
       Author : rbanffy
       Score  : 11 points
       Date   : 2021-04-20 21:01 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.phoronix.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.phoronix.com)
        
       | ncmncm wrote:
       | Recently I learned that it is Gcc policy to reject fixes for
       | optimization regressions anywhere but in trunk releases.
       | 
       | So, a regression seen in Gcc 9 and 10, where a switch statement
       | is no longer converted, where possible, to a single instruction,
       | was fixed in Gcc 11 before its release, but is permanently
       | enshrined in Gcc 9.x and 10.x, for all x for all time. The person
       | who had introduced the regression argued against fixing it.
       | 
       | I don't know what optimizer regressions are permanently enshrined
       | in Gcc 11. I also don't know Clang's policy.
        
         | simcop2387 wrote:
         | This likely isn't a policy out of malice or anything like that,
         | it's entirely going to be because it's,otherwise difficult or
         | impossible to keep any kind if stability and testing with a
         | given branch of the compiler. They're just way too cimplicated
         | to be able to easily tell and test what a set of changes might
         | cause, and because it's udually hard to prove that the change
         | you're making isn;t going to have some kind of butterfly effect
         | on other changes and optimizations that were made. So in the
         | end it's better for stability to fix regressions like that in
         | the next release rather than to keep tweaking things in minor
         | releases where you're otherwise only commiting to changes for
         | correctness and compiler crashes.
        
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       (page generated 2021-04-20 23:02 UTC)