EGCS development proved considerably more vigorous than GCC development, so much so 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.
Skupina razvijalcev, ki je bila nezadovoljna s počasnim napredovanjem in zaprto naravo uradnega razvoja GCC, je leta 1997 razvila projekt z imenom EGCS (Experimental/Enhanced GNU Compiler System).