[oi-dev] Compiler migration #2

[Nick Zivkovic]

All good points. Just want to chime in and say that for userland C
code development, gcc3 is adequate. I don't think anyone will see some
huge, practical benefit from a bleeding edge C compiler.

For C++11 development, it seems that there is no choice but use the
latest and greatest. It's a shame that major apps are written in C++
and not C (like firefox).

Although I do have a question. If gcc3 is deemed more desirable than
gcc4 because it generates code that can run on i386, and isn't
specialized, then why did the Illumos engineers switch the kernel
compiler to gcc4 from sunstudio, and not to gcc3 from sunstudio.

Thanks.

On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 9:10 AM, Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru> wrote:
> On 2013-01-26 20:57, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
>>
>> GCC 4.4 does not produce code for modern CPUs whereas GCC is continually
>> enhanced to be able to produce code which targets modern CPUs.
>
>
> And in terms of prepackaged generic distribution that works on i386
> and above, how can targeting of modern CPUs be a useful bonus and
> not a drawback? This was stressed by Luca's question:
>
>
>> The only possible workarounds are build a recent gcc version yourself or
>> use
>> SFEgcc package, but the last option is not a viable alternative if your
>> CPU is
>> not SSE2-capable. So, not every users are able to use that
>> compiler/runtime.
>
>
> I do know that there are solutions to my questions, and a couple of
> months ago we've discussed them (i.e. prebuilt HW-specific libraries
> lofs-mounted over a common filename, as is libc.so; or usage of UBE
> unified binary executables).
>
> I just wanted to raise this concern - that newest is not always the
> best when you deal with such heterogenous environments. I am "for"
> the optimized code running on machines and using their CPUs in the
> best possible manner, but this should be specially catered for by
> the distro - so that these newest CPUs aren't the only ones capable
> of running this distro ;)
>
> My 2c,
> //Jim Klimov
>
>
>
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