Why people were enthused about GCC early on in its life

Re:Why people were enthused about GCC early on in its life by voltagex_ on Monday February 02, 2015 @06:45PM (#8987919)

Whoa, does that mean there's a chance of replacing the proprietary bootloader on the Pi? It's the most common complaint I see here.

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Re:Why people were enthused about GCC early on in its life by david-given on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @04:17AM (#8989482)

You can replace the proprietary bootloader on the SD card. You can't replace the one in the ROM. And while running executables is easy --- just drop a VC4 binary called bootcode.bin onto the root directory of the card and the ROM loader will load and run it --- there's a lot of hardware setup which still needs to be figured out; such as initialising the SDRAM.

I originally wanted to get Prex (a Minix-like microkernel OS with a Unix interface which doesn't need an MMU) running on the VC4, but I need an actual working compiler for that.

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Re:Why people were enthused about GCC early on in its life by acqq on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @05:35AM (#8989645)

May I ask you: why programming VC4 (apart from taking over the control of the rest of Raspberry Pi?) It's only 250 MHz? And if you want the new control of the Raspberry Pi, why, as it's so proprietary?

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Re:Why people were enthused about GCC early on in its life by nitrogen on Thursday February 05, 2015 @03:28AM (#9002254)

Clock speed is only a very small part of the performance of a chip when comparing across completely different architectures (like VC4 vs. ARM).

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Re:Why people were enthused about GCC early on in its life by david-given on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @11:31AM (#8991269)

Because the VC4 is really cool, basically.

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