Re: Cross-compiling and dist-cc

[Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net>]

John Hasler <jhasler@debian.org> writes:

> Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > And a hell of a lot of work. You can't just create checksums of the
> > resulting binaries and compare those; it's not as if any difference
> > between the two compiled binaries would constitute an error...
> 
> The idea is to cross-compile and native-compile _for_ _the_ _same_ _target_
> _architecture_ and then compare the binaries.  I don't see why they should
> differ.

A compiler is allowed to generate any machine code that correctly does
what the source program does.  But there are many such machine code
programs possible (bajillions, in fact), and a compiler can generate
any one of them.  There is no reason to think that two successive
versions of the same compiler, let alone different compilers, would
produce the same machine code.