hmmm, no C99

[goose]

Support. Lots of people spend lots of money for compilers that don't
outperform GCC just so they have someone to complain to and, if
necessary, sue when there are problems.

And before anyone says "but GCC has a huge support team" remember that
none of them are paid to do it, and, unlike your contracted commercial
supplier, can walk away if they don't fancy fixing the bug.[/QUOTE]

sadly, the commercial support is so bad (here in SA, anyway) that i'd rather
stuff my eyeballs into my ears than listen to why the problem is not
theirs but mine, and to use this 'workaround' ...

even more sadly, although my commercial support team is being paid,
they dont perform nearly half as well as the gcc dev. does.

most sadly, however, is that even though the commercial stuff is paid
for (and therebye funding itself), the docs are shite!!! they are ambigous,
they are lacking in *real* information, and they can mostly only been
seen with a certain type of 'viewer' (windows "help" springs to mind), unlike
the gcc docs, which is copious, mostly accurate, thorough and viewable if
i ssh to the machine that it is stored on. it also means that the commercial
docs are not grep-able (*BIG* minus).

goose,
gcc does have its weaknesses, support isn't one of them ...

 

[Kevin Easton]

Support. Lots of people spend lots of money for compilers that don't
outperform GCC just so they have someone to complain to and, if
necessary, sue when there are problems.

And before anyone says "but GCC has a huge support team" remember that
none of them are paid to do it, and, unlike your contracted commercial
supplier, can walk away if they don't fancy fixing the bug. [/QUOTE]

I'd say you'd have to be a _very_ big organisation indeed to get a deal
on a commercial compiler that obligated the vendor to fix any bugs you
find in it...

- Kevin.

 

[CBFalconer]

I'd say you'd have to be a _very_ big organisation indeed to get
a deal on a commercial compiler that obligated the vendor to fix
any bugs you find in it...

Or find a very small one-man organization supplying the compiler,
much like SOME embedded compilers today, or the early C++ compiler
(circa 1990) that was eventually sold to Symantec and destroyed.
Before that sale the writer was very responsive to the C and C++
community. Unfortunately the name escapes me for now, maybe it
was Zortech.

Gcc is so good, and available for so many systems, at such a
reasonable price that the market for such a small enterprise just
doesn't exist any more.

 

[Richard Heathfield]

Or find a very small one-man organization supplying the compiler,
much like SOME embedded compilers today, or the early C++ compiler
(circa 1990) that was eventually sold to Symantec and destroyed.
Before that sale the writer was very responsive to the C and C++
community. Unfortunately the name escapes me for now, maybe it
was Zortech.

It was. The company was originally called Zorland, in honour of Borland.
(IIRC Borland lawyers didn't see it that way; hence the change to
"Zortech".)

 

[Dan Pop]

Support. Lots of people spend lots of money for compilers that don't
outperform GCC just so they have someone to complain to and,

gcc has a bug reporting procedure that is at least as effective as the
support provided by most commercial vendors. Or, if you need help instead
of having compiler bugs fixed, gnu.gcc.help (or even comp.lang.c ;-) is
more responsive than the support facilities provided by most vendors.

if necessary, sue when there are problems.

Ever read the licence agreement of any piece of commercial software? ;-)
They're all carefully crafted to *explicitly* exclude this possibility.

Dan

 

[lawrence.jones]

gcc has a bug reporting procedure that is at least as effective as the
support provided by most commercial vendors. Or, if you need help instead
of having compiler bugs fixed, gnu.gcc.help (or even comp.lang.c ;-) is
more responsive than the support facilities provided by most vendors.
Agreed.


Ever read the licence agreement of any piece of commercial software? ;-)
They're all carefully crafted to *explicitly* exclude this possibility.

Which doesn't stop people -- particularly the bean counters who tend to
make such decisions -- from thinking they can do so, or even attempting
it. I never said such people were rational, I just said there were a
lot of them.

-Larry Jones

That's one of the remarkable things about life. It's never so
bad that it can't get worse. -- Calvin