Developer(s)
Lionel Debroux
Release
Unknown version number
Pull from GIT ;)
https://github.com/debrouxl/gcc4ti/
Operating system support
Linux/Unix, Mac OS, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows
License
GNU GPL
GCC4TI is a fork of TIGCC which was created because of disputes between a group of users and the current maintainer of TIGCC.
It is still being updated until today, although development is quite slow, mainly because the 68k community is basically dead (and has been since 2006-2007).
Announcement
Lionel Debroux announced GCC4TI on 2009/01/03 with the following message:
First of all, TICT wishes a happy new year to the TI-68k community :-)
Now, on to the topic of this news (although it's not exactly a TICT project, I'm involved with it, so I'm talking about it here).
Over the years, a wish list for TIGCC has been gathered by multiple programmers of the community. Those suggestions are thought to make TIGCC better: optimizations, new features, upgrades, refactorings.
However, many of those suggestions (some of which are actual contributions to TIGCC) don't fit the views and planning of the sole TIGCC maintainer, Kevin Kofler. We know it through private mail or message board discussions, but his todo/wish list is not public.
Therefore, after years where several of us independently thought of it but never united to do it, we have undertaken the work of making a fork of TIGCC, named GCC4TI: http://trac.godzil.net/gcc4ti/. The right to fork is part of the power, beauty - and weakness (although the GPL enforces some reciprocality, unlike the BSDL) - of most free/libre/open source software.
Of course, some of the wishes that are present in both TIGCC and GCC4TI can be developed cooperatively. Actually, they are: see for example the pending patches on the TIGCC/TICT message board.
After an initial "covert" phase of discussing, setting up things and making several changes to the code, we're opening up the infrastructure and making a first public release.
The first GCC4TI public release brings to users, at last, most of the fixes that were made in the TIGCC CVS repository since TIGCC 0.96 Beta 8 was released (i.e. more than two years ago). It also restores VTI support in the TIGCC IDE. There's no question that TIEmu is a better emulator, but VTI is still useful to those using older computers, and are aware of the VTI limitations and bugs.
http://trac.godzil.net/gcc4ti/ links to the other pieces of the infrastructure and to the download page.
We have set up a mailing list, a bug + feature request + patch tracker + wiki to store and allow people to comment on our todo/wish list and patches.
We use SVN instead of CVS for managing the source code centrally. We have collectively decided upon SVN because it's "good enough": it fixes the most glaring flaws of CVS, and has a nicer learning curve than tools like Git or Mercurial have. Of course, developers are free to use whatever SVN-interoperable set of tools they see fit for their local development: SVN, SVK, Git, Mercurial, etc.We'd like GCC4TI to be more community-driven than TIGCC is, but that depends on the community input, i.e. those who read this ;-)
We count on you!
More info
Dozens of bugfixes, optimizations, new features, and an improved build system have been committed to GCC4TI, which basically picked up where TIGCC left. TIGCC has been close to unmaintained since before GCC4TI was created.
Trivia
The ticalc.org news article about GCC4TI resulted in a big discussion between Kevin Kofler and Lionel Debroux:
http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/144/144591.html