On Thu, 13 Mar 2025 20:06:58 +0100 Rainer Orth <r...@cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de> wrote:
> Hi James, > > > Our intention, tell me if you disagree, is that cobol is enabled if > > > > 1. --enable-languages=all, and > > 2. the host and target are "known good", x86_64 or aarch64 > > you tend to forget there's a world outside of Linux, actually: as you > can see at least in PRs cobol/119217 and cobol/119218, the code is > currently riddled with lots of Linux-specific assumptions which break > left and right on e.g. Darwin/x86_64 and Solaris/amd64. Hi Rainer, I'm sure to someone using another OS it looks like I forget they exist. I am sorry for any inconvenience we caused. In my defense, I tried to be clear about what we were bringing to the table. Portabilty has a cost, as you know. It was more important to us to have a working compiler on one platform than an incomplete compiler that could be built on 10. I cut my teeth on NetBSD, but I think choosy users choose Linux today, in the main. (Not so choosy users choose Windows; I'm well aware that running on Windows will broaden our appeal significantly.) I'm grateful for the bug reports. I think the potential users of COBOL on Darwin or Solaris is vanishingly small, but in principle (believe it or not) I too prefer the code to be Posix, not Linux. I myself would be Darwin user, so there's that. I guess the most controversial engineering choice was to rely on __int128 and _Float128. Those gave us native processing and binary <-> string conversion. Having been advised of real.cc, we're taking a look. If we can get 128-bit hardware computation more portably, that's all to the good. But I don't see the point, in 2025, of gmp. it's more important that COBOL take advantage of current hardware than run on a VAX. That's where users are. Hardware computation has real benefits, and software math has measurable impact. When the IT budget has a line item for electricity, that's what matters. I hope you'll agree with me that in the end, that's all that matters. Users matter. Otherwise, what's a compiler for? Kind regards, --jkl
