I'm with Erik. I think that Nathan was just a *bit* unfair, in that I have stated, publically, about 200 bazillion times (and now I will repeat myself) that what he professes our goal to be is our *SHORT TERM* goal. We want a starting point, for the future. I really don't think that there is a person here who is afraid of rewriting something. Linus rewrote the USB stuff for Linux, what, 3 times? That is *FAR* more my experience with engineers - never being happy with what they wrote. I know that I am that way. The first time I got screen_saver to blank the screen, I sat back, smiled for a minute, then looked at the code and said - UGH - that has to be improved. Interestingly enough, though, I *THINK* (and I could be wrong) that the C ABI for GCC has *not* changed. Only the C++. That would mean that we could build the kernel with GCC3 and not break any compatability. I know that Travis is using it now, so it wouldn't be a porting issue. Since the kernel is where preformance is the most important, we could get some experience and practice with GCC3 and still keep our goal of bin compatability. Furthermore, I think that Nathan misses some points. Productive is a good point. I think that most of us own it and use it. How about a browser? Net+ and Opera may be aging, but they are sure better than nothing. There are a hundred cases like this. I agree with Nathan's desire to improve the API and to move the OS forward. I disagree with his timing. >At the risk of sound snippy, we've been over this several times and have >elected, for pragmatic reasons, to do our best to maintain binary >compatibility for the first release -- which rules out GCC3.x for the >time being. This does *not*, however, rule out moving to it at a later >date -- or even providing a parallel set of libraries which have been >built with GCC3.x (just a "for instance"; no flames, please). Folks >keep insisting on thinking we've maneuvered ourselves into a dead-end by >striving for binary compatability at this time, and that just isn't the >case! I respect Nathan's perspective (as well as his ability), but >aside from whether or not we successfully achieve binary compatibility, >this is a total non-issue. > >e > >Alex Jeppesen wrote: >> >> Read this article at http://www.beunited.org/index.php?beos_reform >> its about re-creating beos. it made a good point about how binary >> compatability will make it so you cannot use gcc 3.0 This is a big big >> problem i belive. v3.0 produces better code on many levels and i think its >> worth it to move on up. Anyone else? What do the OpenBeOS ppl think? > >