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By 1991, GCC 1.x had reached a point of stability, but architectural limitations prevented many desired improvements, so the Free Software Foundation started work on GCC 2.x. But during the mid- 1990s, the FSF kept such close control on what was added to the official version of GCC 2.x that GCC was used as one example of the "cathedral" development model in Eric S. Raymond's essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
As GCC was free software, programmers wanting to work in other directions — particularly those writing interfaces for languages other than C — were free to develop their own fork of the compiler. Having multiple forks proved inefficient and unwieldy, however, and the difficulty in getting work accepted by the official GCC project was greatly frustrating for many.
In 1997, a group of developers formed EGCS, to merge several experimental forks into a single project. Projects merged included g77 ( Fortran), PGCC ( PentiumThe Pentium is a fifth-generation x86 architecture microprocessor by Intel which first shipped on March 22, 1993. It is the successor to the 486 line. The Pentium was originally to be named 80586 or i586, but the name was changed to Pentium because number-optimised GCC), many C++C+ (pronounced "sea plus plus") is a general-purpose computer programming language. It is a statically typed free-form multi-paradigm language supporting procedural programming, data abstraction, object-oriented programming, and generic programming. Durin improvements and many new architectures and operating systemIn computing, an operating system OS is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations, as well as running application software such as word processing programs and web browsers. In general, t variants.
EGCS development proved sufficiently more vital than GCC development that the FSF officially halted development on their GCC 2.x compiler, "blessed" EGCS as the official version of GCC and appointed the EGCS project as the GCC maintainers in April 1999. Furthermore, the project explicitly adopted the "bazaar" model over the "cathedral" model. With the release of GCC 2.95 in July 1999, the two projects were once again united.