[oi-dev] SFE developer for OpenIndiana

[Sašo Kiselkov]

On 01/21/2013 04:01 PM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> 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.

Okay, I just wanted to ask whether we're doing something to make sure
we're not at Oracle's mercy to build our stuff. I don't mind if it is
gcc-4.4.4, or gcc-4.6.2 or clang, or whatever - as long as we keep on
using it and not have to worry about our future.

> 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.

Glad to see clang development coming along nicely. If nothing else, at
least it keeps the GCC folks on their toes, improving the compiler (not
that I think that GCC wasn't improving, but a new compiler allows for
exploring new solutions to problems).

--
Saso