"someone like Walter Bright will have to jump in, he probably knows GCC inside-out"

FWIW, walter has not contributed a single patch to GCC i can find in the past 10 years (It may be longer, i stopped looking) :)

Not that this makes him bad in any way, mind you, he's just not who i'd go to for gcc expertise. That would be someone like Richard Henderson, who is pretty much never talked about, but has touched pretty much all parts of the compiler and always does great work.

Also note that embedded developers in general do not have a good reputation among compiler people for doing "sound work". Again, not that this is a characterization of their engineering skills - They often have very tight deadlines, so the amount of time they can spend figuring out things instead of applying bandaids tends to be pretty limited. So they patch something, submit it, and move on.