William ChopsWestfield wrote:

> One of the unfortunate aspects of open source compilers (ie gcc) is that
> the developers don't seem to have so much motivation to maintain enough
> backward compatibility to keep "customers" very happy.  Every time we
> upgrade to a new release of gcc, we wind up with an expensive firedrill
> where our tools maintenance group gets to patch all the things we really
> think we need into the compiler, and the rest of development engineering
> gets to patch the product code to fix the things the new compiler
> doesn't like that we end up agreeing are actually wrong.  

If you don't go with an open source compiler, you can't patch it -- in this
sense this is correct. But then, you could resist the temptation to patch
an open source compiler even if you do use one -- if the patching is not
worth it :)

> And of course we can't talk to a "real" compiler vendor without taking
> along a list of "special" features that their compiler has to support
> before we can even consider looking at it. 

See... the "real" vendors don't seem to be a "real" alternative. The
problem doesn't seem to be open source, but the very specific features you
guys need.

Gerhard

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