Re: gcc distribution (was: SOLVED! Decoupled Mutual Recursion Challenger)

[kenner@lab.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner)]

In article <392u2l$jt4@watnews1.watson.ibm.com> ncohen@watson.ibm.com writes:
>This is distressing.  One of the things that most excited me about the
>GNAT project when I first heard about it was the prospect that an Ada
>compiler would be hidden in each standard gcc distribution, and thus
>serve as a Trojan horse to sneak Ada into the camps of the C programmers.

That's an interesting concept.

However, an increasing number of people are getting various CD-ROMS of
all the GNU tools together, so this is less of an issue.  Also, many
of the binary distributions may have all the compilers.

But for the official source distribution, one large file is a problem.
The GCC 2.6.1 distribution will be 7.1 MB.  0.7 MB of that is g++.  So
once that's split off, there'll be a 6.4 MB base compiler.

Then 0.7 MB for C++, 1.7 MB for Ada, and some unknown sizes for
Fortran, Chill, Pascal, and others.

All this stuff is getting up to something like 12 MB of compressed
tar.  That's getting to the point where you may not actually be able
to copy the full file before the network connection dies.

Also, there's the very serious problem of coordinating releases of all
of these language, which are being independently developed.

For GCC 2.6.0, we decided to set up a mechanism to enable other
languages, specifically such as Ada, to be able to be "dropped in" on
top of the base GCC distribution.

>Upon accidently discovering Ada compilers on their machines, gcc users,
>epsecially in academia might be tempted to try it out one day.
>Also, users would be more likely to download Ada source code if they were
>told, "You probably already have an Ada compiler on your machine that you
>never knew about," than if they were told, "You can obtain an Ada
>compiler by anonymous ftp as follows...." A tool readily at hand is much
>more likely to be tried out on a whim than one that must be retrieved
>over the net first.

Well, yes, but I'd guess that people who would be trying Ada "on whim"
are not likely to be those that will get excited by what they find.

Also, note that Ada and C++ will be on equal footing soon; neither will
come with the base GCC source distribution and both will have to be
copied over and dropped in.