Re: [MiNT] GCC 4.2.2 and binary compatibility

[Vincent Rivière <vincent.riviere@freesbee.fr>]

> I don't know quite how important this is but I know people have been
> trying to get GCC 4 working for years.

Other people did it, too. Patrice Mandin made a lot of ports of GCC 2.X 
and 3.X. And Olivier Landemarre ported GCC 4.1.

> Presumably some things that won't compile under the old GCC can now
> be built ?

Well, it is mainly a question of patience. A *lot* of patience.
It is not very hard to port GCC to the MiNT target. The changes are very 
localized. But when something goes wrong, the cause must be found. 
Sometimes on GCC, sometimes in the MiNTLib, sometimes in the binutils... 
And most of the time, after a change, everything must be recompiled...

But porting the binutils 2.17 (then 2.18) was a lot more difficult. The 
main trick was done by Guido Flohr years ago (marvelous hack !) and most 
of it is still valid from version to version. But the official binutils 
team have made a lot of cleanup in the latest versions, introducing 
horrible bugs for our platform. Fortunately they are now fixed !

> Well done.

I would be very proud if all that work would be useful for the community.

Vincent