Re: Clang as default compiler November 4th

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 08:21:31AM +0200, Pietro Cerutti wrote:
> On 2012-Sep-11, 23:29, Doug Barton wrote:
> > What we need to do is what I and others have been asking to do for
> > years. We need to designate a modern version of gcc (no less than 4.6)
> > as the official default ports compiler, and rework whatever is needed to
> > support this. Fortunately, that goal is much more easily achieved than
> > fixing ports to build and run with clang. (It's harder than it sounds
> > because there are certain key libs that define some paths depending on
> > what compiler they were built with, but still easier than dealing with
> > clang in the short term.)
> 
> I like the idea very much. My only concern is that gcc is heavy to
> build.

Gerald has been advocating this for a while as well.  In fact, he's
just made a commit that makes the lang/gcc42 compiler much easier to
bootstrap itself.

There's a set of interlocking changes that we need to make to the
infrastructure to modernize our compiler choices.  I've been talking
to Gerald about some of the aspects of it and hope to have something
to propose fairly soon.

But IMHO it's a little bit trickier than it appears at first glance.

mcl