GCCSDK & GCC Update

I’m not sure if this post is the right place.

Just been doing some digging in an idle moment and realized that our GCC is getting a bit behind the current version (as I understand it we use 4.7.4 and the current version is 8.1).

What would it take to update? Is it worth updating?

erm…can someone delete my strangely triplicated posts…?

What would it take to update?

Time and effort. (Asking on the GCCSDK mailing list will likely get a more detailed answer)

Is it worth updating?

Not sure. There was recently some talk of them dropping support for older ARM architectures / features, so newer versions of GCC are likely to require greater maintenance on our part in order to re-integrate the missing features (or we could drop support for the older machines from our port – but that might be a hard sell, unless we were to maintain both old & new versions of the compiler)

GCC 4.8 removes support for the FPA floating point instructions. That means it would be unable to generate code to do hard-float on any hardware that uses the FPEmulator, or to interwork with existing code that uses FPA.

Plus there is nobody doing compiler work on RISC OS GCC since John stepped down.

(as I understand it we use 4.7.4 and the current version is 8.1).

There’s an element of “version numberitis” in that. If you look at the version numbers they shifted from a x.y.z increment system to a x.y system.

Prviously x only changed on a really major change of features thus it took from 1987 to 2001 to get from version 1.0 to 3.0 and 2005 for v4.0 in which sequence branches were numbered x.y with increment z
They now have branches numbered x with increment y.

Thus the peimary numeric x changes more frequently and using the old numbering system the currently release is probably 5.4.1.

We’re still somewhat behind.