[oi-dev] Transitioning from Sun Studio to gcc & clang/llvm

[Alasdair Lumsden]

Hi Guido,

On 23 May 2011, at 21:29, Guido Berhoerster wrote:

> * Alasdair Lumsden <alasdairrr at gmail.com> [2011-05-23 17:22]:
>> This is why the gcc version supplied will be fixed for a 5+ year period - I doubt we'll be changing the gcc version any time soon after doing this. When we do update to a newer GCC or to llvm/clang or another compiler, we can continue to supply the library, via a compat package.
> 
> Currently x.0  gcc releases seem to be supported for about two
> years [1], that means gcc 4.5 will likely be supported until
> around April 2012. Even if we adopt 4.6.0 now, we will be on our
> own with it for three years. This is not so much a problem for
> large Linux vendors like Redhat or SUSE which have inhouse
> capacities/expertise to deal with any issues on their own but I
> know it has been biting Projects like FreeBSD and given our
> current manpower and capacities I don't see how we can deal with
> that.

Unfortunately I don't think we have a choice in the matter. Unless richlowe's patches can be added to llvm/clang easily then we have to take a pragmatic approach.

At some point over the next 2 years Oracle will switch to gcc 4.x, and when they do I imagine it'll go into userland-gate, where we can pick up the patches they integrate. I seem to remember reading something about gcc-4 recently but I can't for the life of me remember where, perhaps I dreamt it. We also have the patches available from the major distributions, and primarily security patches are the major concern here.

Lastly, if we're planning to use libc++ then thats one less component to worry about.

I don't view support as a massive headache, but I do appreciate it's something we need to keep in mind.

Cheers,

Alasdair