GCC Is Still Months Away From Transitioning To Git, Reposurgeon Being Ported To Golang

2018 sadly wasn't the year that the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) transitioned to a Git workflow for developing this flagship open-source compiler... But Eric S Raymond does continue making progress on being able to convert the GCC tree from SVN to Git.

Back during the summer Eric S Raymond said the Git transition was being held up by RAM prices, in particular needing more DDR4 in his main workstation with 64GB not being enough for his software to convert the massive SVN tree to Git. And that's when he said his system with more RAM would work out better than using a public cloud, the GCC build infrastructure, or other alternatives to quickly access more computing resources with greater amounts of RAM to handle this conversion of the revision control system.

He later shared that his "Reposurgeon" software was too slow and also yielded some incorrect content appearing in the repository. At that point he had a belief that rewriting his software in Golang rather than Python could yield around a 40x performance improvement and make it possible to finally translate the entire GCC code history to Git.

Months later, we finally heard a new status update from ESR about this process. Eric did go ahead with his pursuit to translate the code into Go. He says that is about 90% complete and is yielding a speed-up of at least three to four times. Based upon the current numbers, he thinks the GCC test runs could be down to about three hours but that he could further tune his software for even greater performance.

He says progress is being made but trying again at the repository conversion is likely at least another two months out.

Hopefully in 2019 we'll finally see GCC switch over to Git.