GCC 5.5 Will Come Before Killing Off GCC5

[uid313]

I use Ubuntu 17.10 which I upgraded from 17.04, 16.10, 16,04, etc.
Why does my system contain gcc4, gcc5, gcc,6 and gcc7?

[GI_Jack]

What bugs me is that Debian will persist with its immutable GCC 6.3 until death. Isn't Debian supposed to care about bug-fixes? GCC 6.4 has already been out for months now and it contains fixes to many bugs.



Fedora 24 was declared dead on August 8th, 2017.

Debian wants stability, and it will get stability, i.e. playing with the same compiler for the life of a release. That's smart. Especially for a compiler. When you update the compiler you have to re-base and re-test everything. Lot of work, then guarantee it remains backwards compatible at a binary level. Thats what a stable release is. Will it work 99.9% of the time? Probably, but I can't guarantee it.

As far as fedora, even old versions are using newer GCC.

That said, if you want "bleeding edge" instead of stable releases that all compile with a known, unchanging toolchain, again, great for 3rd party apps that target production environments, use Arch. Arch isn't a production environment.

[stalkerg]

oh... even with gcc6 we have problems https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=gcc-6 it means you can use only one compiler.

[GdeR]

Debian wants stability, and it will get stability, i.e. playing with the same compiler for the life of a release. That's smart. Especially for a compiler. When you update the compiler you have to re-base and re-test everything. Lot of work, then guarantee it remains backwards compatible at a binary level. Thats what a stable release is. Will it work 99.9% of the time? Probably, but I can't guarantee it.

Thanks for your explanation and please forgive my ignorance. But why everything needs to get rebased and retested when you recompile GCC 6.4 with GCC 6.3 which was used to build any other binary? Doesn't this guarantee compatibility? I'm not really into this level of programming, but GCC 6.4 as far as I know is just a maintenance release, meaning it doesn't bring anything new but bug-fixes. Thanks.