[OpenIndiana-discuss] Tasks to focus on

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Aurelien Larcher kindly posted his OpenIndiana project list from last
spring in e-mail on this list of Thu, 7 Jan 2021 22:39:12 +0100.

Among your projects from March 2020, I believe strongly that the most
important BY FAR is getting gcc-10 to build itself and all of the
OpenIndiana / Omnios software suite.

Once that is done, then gcc-11 should be a breeze (I've personally
done several thousand builds of gcc-x for x in 2--11).

Those compilers can then bootstrap LLVM / Clang compilers. Absolutely
EVERYTHING ELSE is contingent on having reliable and modern C and C++
compilers (and also Ada, D, Java (gcc-6 and earlier only), Fortran,
Objective C/C++, Pascal, ....).  Those can then build new gcc-go,
Rust, awk / mawk / gawk, Javascript, pcc, Python, tcc, .... releases.

Google Go was originally written in C, but two or three years ago, it
was rewritten in Go, with a C-based bootstrap compiler used to get the
process rolling.

The GNU Ada translator (gnat) has a similar bootstrap problem, because
part of gnat after gcc-4.x was foolishly rewritten in Ada itself,
instead of being kept in portable Standard C that can be built pretty
much anywhere, and also made available in new CPU environments as new
compiler backends are written (e.g,, ARM and RISC-V in recent years).
That makes porting software and O/Ses to new CPU platforms much
easier.

I've been using Unix systems for almost 40 years, and have a farm of
more than 500 flavors of such for most of the main CPU families.  Old
vendor-supplied compiler versions have caused huge pain in Red Hat,
CentOS, Solaris, and OpenBSD, because they make it impossible to build
a lot of newer software. While I'm often able to build newer gcc and
clang releases, most computer users are completely stuck with what the
vendor or O/S distribution provides, and could not possibly build gcc
or clang on their own.


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