On Mon, Dec 17, 2001 at 11:32:39PM -0500, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:

 > At least parts of what Apple bundles into the base system are demonstrably
 > not compiled with gcc, because they contain code sequences gcc can't 
 > generate (e.g. vectorization using AltiVec).  Now, either Apple has loads
 > of hand-tuned asm everywhere (which would be silly, except in a few very
 > specific places), or they've compiled certain bits of things with a real
 > PPC compiler and link the generated .S files (or huge asm statements) into
 > their otherwise gcc-compiled code, or they simply use a real compiler to
 > build, for example, much of the multimedia stuff.

Actually...

Just because they're not compiled with the STOCK GCC (i.e. what you can
download from the FSF) doesn't mean they're not compiled without GCC.

Apple folks have been steadily feeding back e.g. AltiVec stuff into GCC
for a while now.

-- 
        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@wasabisystems.com>