[oi-dev] SFE developer for OpenIndiana

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Mon, 21 Jan 2013, Sašo Kiselkov wrote:

> On 01/21/2013 03:20 PM, Luca De Pandis wrote:
>> Hi guys,
>>
>> i would like to become a SFE software porter for the OI community.
>>
>> I've already downloaded the SFE trunk from the svn repository, installed
>> Sun Studio 12.1 and CBE.
>
> I know I might be slightly off-topic here, but isn't OI going to switch
> to GCC for building? Studio is proprietary and being at the mercy of
> Oracle and their wild licensing policies doesn't seem like a good idea
> to me. Illumos has made the switch go GCC-4.4.4 almost half a year ago
> and it is in the IO repos (pkg:/developer/illumos-gcc).

GCC poses interesting issues which as which libgcc_s.so.1 to use. 
GCC-4.4.4 uses a different libgcc_s.so.1 than SFE GCC 4.6.2. 
Recently, OpenIndiana SFE was completely re-spun to use SFE GCC 4.6.2 
and any program built with this compiler which needs libgcc_s.so.1 
will use the one from GCC 4.6.2.  There is also the problem with C++ 
and C++ ABIs.  The GCC C++ library ABIs don't seem to be all that 
stable (especially when one considers templates and evolving C++ 
standards) and mixing code between major GCC versions is definitely 
not advised.  Linux deals with this by rebuilding everything for each 
major release with the same compiler.  Solaris has historically had a 
much more stable run-time and ABI than Linux and the user expectations 
are different.

Regardless, depending on Oracle for the compiler is definitely not a 
good long-term plan.

Besides GCC, the clang compiler works on OpenIndiana and may be 
promising once the FreeBSD people get all the kinks figured out and 
someone develops an OpenMP implementation for it.

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/