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Programming > Compilers > Re: Bootstrapin...
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Re: Bootstraping compilers ?

by Greg Lindahl <lindahl@[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Apr 18, 2008 at 02:13 PM

I had the pleasure of working with some ex-SGI compiler people at
PathScale, and they had 2 major reasons for bootstrapping:

1) You don't want to hunt bugs in the other compiler that make it
compile your compiler wrong. We had a slowly increasing list of files
in our compiler that needed -O0 with gcc to compile correctly, or
obscure bugs would surface. Now maybe our compiler code wasn't
standard conforming, or maybe gcc had a bug. Either way, we don't want
to be in the business of fixing gcc.

2) You (should) have a great QA testsuite for your compiler, better
than the average customer has for their own programs. You can find and
fix a lot of obscure bugs by bootstrapping with lots of flag
combinations and looking for changes in the QA suite results.

On the general topic of QA, a good lesson we learned from gcc was that
building an entire Linux distro is a pretty useful exercise. You have
to be pretty gcc-compatible to do it, and sometimes the bugs are hard
to localize (binary search through huge lists of rpms..., and it'd
better be easily repeatable).

-- greg
 




 19 Posts in Topic:
Bootstraping compilers ?
pocm@[EMAIL PROTECTED] (  2008-04-16 22:30:21 
Re: Bootstraping compilers ?
Chris Hills <chris@[EM  2008-04-18 11:45:12 
Re: Bootstraping compilers ?
pocm@[EMAIL PROTECTED] (  2008-04-22 00:07:22 
Re: Bootstraping compilers ?
David Spencer <spencer  2008-04-22 16:05:51 
Re: Bootstraping compilers ?
Hans-Peter Diettrich <  2008-04-22 20:07:33 
Re: Bootstraping compilers ?
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Roland_Lei  2008-04-18 07:32:18 
Re: Bootstraping compilers ?
Marco van de Voort <ma  2008-04-18 19:32:59 
Re: Bootstraping compilers ?
"Damian Thomas"  2008-04-18 08:46:51 
Re: Bootstraping compilers ?
Marco van de Voort <ma  2008-04-18 19:38:29 
Re: Bootstraping compilers ?
"Christopher Glaeser  2008-04-19 23:42:06 
Re: Bootstraping compilers ?
Greg Lindahl <lindahl@  2008-04-18 14:13:55 
Re: Bootstraping compilers ?
torbenm@[EMAIL PROTECTED]  2008-04-21 10:35:52 
Re: Bootstraping compilers ?
Hans-Peter Diettrich <  2008-04-21 20:22:33 
Re: Bootstraping compilers ?
glen herrmannsfeldt <g  2008-04-21 21:18:53 
Re: Bootstraping compilers ?
glen herrmannsfeldt <g  2008-04-23 00:47:23 
Re: Fortran H, was Bootstraping compilers ?
"Comp.compilers"  2008-04-23 21:15:42 
Re: Fortran H, was Bootstraping compilers ?
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?J=FCrgen_K  2008-04-24 17:59:13 
Re: Fortran H, was Bootstraping compilers ?
glen herrmannsfeldt <g  2008-04-25 12:57:11 
Re: Fortran H, was Bootstraping compilers ?
glen herrmannsfeldt <g  2008-04-24 10:07:24 

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