Re: GCC withdraw

From: David Chisnall <theraven_at_freebsd.org>
Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2013 19:28:07 +0100
On 1 Sep 2013, at 19:03, Mark Linimon <linimon_at_lonesome.com> wrote:

> If this is the case, IMHO:

I was going to quote the whole mail, but actually this is enough.  As I have already said in this thread, there is no such plan.  I repeat, for those who missed it the first time:

On 30 Aug 2013, at 16:11, David Chisnall <theraven_at_FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> I am not proposing:
> 
> ...
> 
> - To deprecate any architectures
> 
> - To break any architectures


If a platform ends up without a working toolchain in a few years and there is no way (LLVM, recent GCC, heavily patched old GCC, vendor-supplied toolchain) of building it, then we will have to make the decision about its future.  Whether that means getting the Foundation and / or some other interested body to pay for someone to work on a toolchain or dropping support is an issue for stakeholders in the platform.  

We will probably have to make this call about at least IA64 in a couple of years, and possibly some PowerPC and SPARC variants, but it's not a decision that needs to be made any time soon.  I know SemiHalf does a lot of embedded FreeBSD work with PowerPC and a few people do with SPARC, so there are definitely people with vested interests in maintaining those two platforms.  I'd honestly be surprised if IA64 is around in two years (mind you, I've been expecting it to die for the last five, so I'm willing to be surprised again), but maybe there will be a lot of cheap second-hand IA64 hardware on the market as all of the big customers switch to something else reviving interest in the platform...

David


Received on Sun Sep 01 2013 - 16:28:16 UTC

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