Re: GCC withdraw

On Aug 29, 2013, at 8:57 AM, John Baldwin wrote:

> On Saturday, August 24, 2013 7:19:22 am David Chisnall wrote:
>> On 24 Aug 2013, at 11:30, "Sam Fourman Jr." <sfourman_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> So I vote, let's not give ourselves the burden of "lugging" dead weight in
>>> base
>>> for another 5 years. (in 2017 do we still want to be worrying about gcc in
>>> base?)
>> 
>> Perhaps more to the point, in 2017 do we want to be responsible for
>> maintaining a fork of a 2007 release of gcc and libstdc++?
> 
> This is a red herring and I'd wish you'd stop bringing it up constantly.
> GCC has not needed constant care and feeding in the 7.x/8.x/9.x branches
> and it won't need it in 10.x either.  I have not seen any convincing
> argument as to why leaving GCC in the base for 10.x impedes anything.
> Because clang isn't sufficient for so many non-x86 platforms we can't
> really start using clang-specific features yet anyway.

Agreed. Gcc is still an absolute requirement on all non-x86 platforms (including arm) due to the issues with clang. Some of these issues are bugs in specific things (arm) that keep coming up (and keep getting fixed), while others are more severe (sparc64 has no clang support, and no way to generate a self-hosting system in the absence of a bootstrap gcc in the base, even with the external toolchain support).

gcc will absolutely be in the base for 10. That's the long-standing agreement that we've had, and breaking it now at the 11th hour is going to totally screw up !x86 platforms and really piss off a lot of developers for no good reason. The time is long since past to change this plan.

This is the plan of record, and we need to stick to it:

	10: clang default, where possible, gcc in base otherwise
	11: clang default, full external toolchain support, including self-hosting

So the time for voting and carping has long since past.

Warner