[indiana-discuss] Curious about GCC/Sun Studio/direction OSOL is taking with regards to these

[James Cornell]

David Orman wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I was unfortunately not 
> able to dredge up this information. What are the plans with OSOL in 
> terms of gcc/sun studio? Is the plan to eventually have OSOL built 
> around gcc, and integrate the additional optimizations sun studio is 
> capable of into gcc (mainline?) Probably some licensing/intellectual 
> properties involved here, just curious what the game plan is.
>
> What prompts this question - I have a heck of a time compiling a lot 
> of software on OSOL. Not that this is a fault of OSOL (90% of the time 
> it's braindead autoconf scripts, and things of the like - written for 
> gnu-specific toolchains - for example the linker.) I'm just curious if 
> the eventual plan is to switch to the gnu toolchain for the base 
> distribution, or if there will always be a seperation, with some 
> solaris development toolchain tools, and some gnu.
>
> Also, this post piqued my interest: 
> http://forums.opensolaris.com/thread.jspa?threadID=492&tstart=0 
> <http://forums.opensolaris.com/thread.jspa?threadID=492&tstart=0>
>
> One last thing, what's the status of gcc in opensolaris? This is quite 
> an older version, although I don't necessarily need any of the newer 
> functionality/fixes, they'd be nice. :) I attempted a build, but it 
> was (as usual) a lot of fist fighting, and I didn't have to time to 
> deal with it.
>
> ormandj at opensolaris-ormandj:~$ gcc --version
> gcc (GCC) 3.4.3 (csl-sol210-3_4-20050802)
> Copyright (C) 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
> warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR 
> PURPOSE.
>
> ormandj at opensolaris-ormandj:~$
>
> Thank you for all of your input, even if you're just pointing me in 
> the right direction or telling me where to look, it would be very much 
> appreciated!
>
> Keep up the great work, I look forward to the future. :)
>
> Cheers,
> David Orman
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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>   
There was a standalone 4.x technology preview around the net somewhere, 
might have been for SPARC only though.  There's always Blastwave mirrors 
(Yes it seems to be back up) and the dated SFW site with different 
newish GCC builds.  I doubt at this time Sun will be able to sort 
through patent issues to get the support integrated.  Placing more 
dependence on GCC is not a good idea, despite what you may think about 
it being a necessity, it really isn't.  Most packages on top of the base 
are built with SPEC files which have per-compiler settings, where 
appropriate or necessary.  I suspect that integration, especially with 
regards to GNU autotools will eventually happen in the Sun Studio tree, 
but maybe not in the other direction, and probably not with regards to 
the actual C/CC compilers.

The GCC bundled on OpenSolaris is a cumulation of backported fixes and 
Solaris-specific optimizations, and is fairly successful at compiling 
with parity most of the distribution's core components, but not the 
kernel, which still prefers Sun Studio 11, while the current release is 
Sun Studio 12.  As for OpenSolaris Indiana (Not SXCE) there are 
integration issues at hand with maintaining multiple Sun Studio bundles 
on the system, let alone fetching them, so you need to grab the packages 
and use the provided tools to install it the old way instead of using 
ips if this is the case.  Any competant developer should be able to 
juggle around compilers, but when it comes to OpenSolaris' offerings in 
particular there are many and it can be quite confusing.

Perhaps you should try and locate who is doing GCC 4.x for OpenSolaris 
if you depend on something in particular that was fixed in the release.  
GCC 4.x release seems to produce more optimized code than 3.x, 
especially with regards to loop optimization and parallelization, so 
it's important that at minimal developers are made aware of its state on 
OpenSolaris, and if possible to provide it through a SVR4 package to 
SXCE users and publish to an ips mirror so we can maintain our 
workspaces with clean copies of the current developer tools.  Here's a 
link for GCC4 support on OpenSolaris SPARC which says it's augmented to 
be almost on par with Sun Studio, hopefully they do the same for us x64 
users: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/gccfss-on/

James