On May 28, 2013, at 12:10 PM, David Chisnall wrote: > On 28 May 2013, at 18:40, Warner Losh <i...@bsdimp.com> wrote: > >> That's not going to happen soon. While it works OK for amd64, there's still >> many bugs in its ARM support and even more in its MIPS support. There's 0 >> chance it will be gone in 10... > > I disagree. There is a significant chance that gcc in base will be gone for > all Tier 1 platforms in 10.0. There are still some reasons to want gcc > installed, but there are no compelling reasons to want an ancient version of > gcc installed on x86[-64] or ARM. For people who need gcc, the ports > collection provides a selection of recent versions.
I think that's wildly optimistic. We have an integrated system, and until clang makes it through a release, we need an easy to deploy backup plan. While you can use clang in 9.x, it isn't default, so we're not getting a lot of testing. While it is default in -current, there have been many features that were default in current for years that didn't find major, day-one problems when the release came. Today clang is useless for ARM kernels with WITNESS due to clang bugs. While these bugs are being addressed (or maybe in the last week or two have been addressed), there's be no stress testing of clang-built systems to the level where we'd have high confidence that the result is production ready. We haven't even begun to start to shake out all the other ARM bugs that may be present. While it is true that Apple's #1 target with clang is arm and amd64, it isn't for a system that's totally identical to FreeBSD, so there are bound to be integration issues lurking. And that doesn't even begin to cover ports, but at least there a fallback to gcc strategy can be via the ports tree. History with the project follows the pattern of having wildly idealistic goals, followed by realistic achievement in a time frame that was much longer than was initially planned. Clang adaptation has followed this pattern to date, and there's no reason to believe that it will be so perfect that a fallback to gcc won't be needed for 10. Besides, it will still be needed for ia64, sparc64 and likely mips in the 10 time frame, so it will still be in the system, and still integrated into the system. That's really where my 0 chance comment came from. The FreeBSD project is more than just tier 1 platforms. Warner _______________________________________________ freebsd-toolchain@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-toolchain To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-toolchain-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
