Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News
Chronicler Zack Brown reports on "There Are Standards and Standards."
There Are Standards and Standards
One of the most bizarre areas of kernel development lies in the relationship between the kernel and the compiler. Since the creation of Linux at the start of the 1990s, there have been wars fought between the developers of these two projects. In one such case, Linus Torvalds refused to recognize any GNU C Compiler (GCC) version after a certain date, on the grounds that later versions produced bad machine code.
Relationships have become a lot less strained between the two projects since then. However, the question of mending fences does sometimes arise. And it's not always clear whether a problem in the Linux kernel would be best solved by changing the kernel source code or changing the compiler source code. Sometimes the best answer may be simply whatever avoids war.
Recently, Vincent Mailhol tried to simplify some kernel code, relying on the features of the C11 standard for the C programming language that Linux is written in.
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