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Comment by rurban | Hacker News Reader

Why do they always comment on gcc not the latest as a bad thing? The base compiler needs to be stable. Newer releases might be faster and better on edge cases, but also have much more bugs. Many of them serious.

7 is a good choice, 8 might also work. everything since 9 is very experimental. 10 even crashes on the simpliest of my testcases. how fc32 managed this is a miracle.

latest is not always best, mostly worst.

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I'm now curious about how are you abusing your compilers. I've never seen GCC crash because of the code I've written.

Try C++ template meta programming. I lost count of the number of times I have crashed Clang and GCC.

Once you start throwing tens of millions of lines at them, crashes become quite more frequent.

To all the people who will now let us know that GCC crashes for them (and I've no doubt it does, I'm not questioning your honesty), do you put in bug reports?

If they care yes. For gcc it's an unpleasant experience. And minimizing the testcases is an art lost to me.

For llvm it's pleasent.

Using the latest features. Like -O4 -flto=4 cef retpoline and such. But mostly it's the simple things, like the string library, which broke in 9. Only 50% of the added bugs fixed so far. They are moving too fast.

Yeah, I observed lots of bugs in GCC 6. Many of them serious. And most of them were fixed in next version.

How would they get gcc crash reports if you refuse to upgrade to latest? :)

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