Yes, the syntax is the same. It also support various GNU and BSD extensions.
GNU bc is unmaintained for years. The latest version is from 2017. It don't have a repo or a mailing list.
bc-gh started in 2018 and it is still actively developed. It is adopted by many projects I've listed in my post.
perhaps they don't care about bc. I think they don't even notice that GNU bc haven't been updated since 2017.
I will change it to "licensing reason". Thank you
But the software you listed are used by many peoples. bc-gh is robust and performant, GNU bc is not actively developed, and benchmark shows that it is clearly slower than bc-gh in most case. But in most distros bc-gh is not available.
But there are technical reason too. IIRC, gcc > 4.3 drop support for some architecture?
Linux distros not shipping Gavin Howard's bc for licensing reasons
(for anyone who do not know, bc is a "arbitrary-precision arithmetic language". its syntax is similar to C)
Gavin Howard's bc (bc-gh) is adopted by busybox, toybox, FreeBSD, Android, macOS for its robustness and superior performance. It is also shipped with Gentoo Linux; LFS also use bc-gh.
Even though bc-gh is more robust and updated, Linux distros other than Gentoo and Fedora do not package it it. bc-gh is not available on Arch (available on AUR), Debian and perhaps all of its derivative. The reason seems to be a licensing reason: bc-gh is under the BSD license.
bc-gh is clearly superior to GNU bc, Gavin Howard's benchmark show that bc-gh is faster than GNU bc in most case, while bc-gh actually do more work than GNU bc.
Today I tested GNU bc and bc-gh. I let they do this operation: (1024\*1024)^(1024\*1024). GNU bc give me the answer in five minutes, bc-gh give me the answer in two minutes.
GNU bc do not have a repository. All development happen in private, and we can't make sure it is still maintained. The latest version is 1.07 from 2017. bc-gh have a public repository and it is actively maintained.
So it is clear that other Linux distro not adopting bc-gh is purely licensing reason. They reject software not under the GPL license, even if they are more robust and more performant.
We need a campaign to raise awareness about superior software alternatives. We need to stop Linux distro for not adopting superior and updated softwares for licensing reasons.
Making a LFS distro already show you all the GNU mess! Why another distro?
The Linux world have bad things, especially in userland and libc
op-ti-mize [verb (trans.)]* … (gcc) to modify executable code so that it fails more quickly.
Wow. Hope that they will do better than kspp
BSD developers: who cares about that. And, it is already happen. Android libc use lots of code of OpenBSD libc. OpenSSH is used everywhere.
GNU's ssh implementation seems to be some abandoned trash, even though it was started in 1998, before OpenSSH. If OpenSSH doesnt exist, we can hope that everyone will be using differently broken ssh implementations; I'd expect gnu ssh to be a buggy, unreliable implementation which support hundreds of thounsands of flags and configuration options. Workers everywhere will be punished because of their buggy implementation of ssh. Why workers in every companies have to make their own ssh implementation? They should be doing something else.
"Stable distro" meaning
Distributions like RHEL and Debian freeze packages, you will have to use old package when the newer is available. I think these distributions is just for highly mission-critical system, they have to run software smoothly, no breakage. Most personal computer don't need that stability.
Can anyone explain more about what a stable distributions mean?