At Thu, 6 Jun 2002 10:14:33 +0100 (BST), Dominic Sweetman wrote: > Difference in perception here. Noted. > Up to and including the 2.96+ release we currently work with, no GCC > version we've taken on has been fit for use by our MIPS customers > without a large number of fixes, including significant changes to > nominally non-machine-dependent code. > > If you experienced a big improvement in quality on moving to some more > recent version, I'd love to know and that's worth telling everyone. > > But if you're saying "it's always been more or less all right" then we > are bound to suspect you're not looking hard enough... "I don't know." I didn't really spend a _lot_ of time staring at the gnu toolchain until about 2 or 3 years ago (mips tools, 2 or so years 8-). Before that, i relied on tools that others had massaged ... and invariably, yes, they did have at least a few "important" bug fixes (often pulled in from later development versions of the tools). I think even going back 2 and change years, we had some problems with the versions of gcc at that time, and, for some sets of compile flags (for us, -membedded-pic) a _lot_ of problems with binutils. As of gcc 3.0.4 and w/ binutils 2.12.1 (with patches to each, but generally not bug-fixes .... though we undoubtedly still have a few), at least for us, they seem to work well for linux and for some amount of stand-alone embedded development work. I wouldn't disagree, BTW, that the current tools for mips seem to have some shortcomings. I also wouldn't claim that we've comprehensively tested the tools. 8-) I think the goal of improving test suites to show additional bugs is a very good one. Personally, I've been trying to make sure regression tests get added for bugs we find & fix, but there will always be more bugs to find. chris
