On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 11:05:39AM +0200, Steven Bosscher wrote: > On Wednesday 14 September 2005 10:53, Robert Dewar wrote: > > Gerald Pfeifer wrote: > > > (If so, I'm wondering what it's going to buy the interested parties, > > > because I have a hard time seeing one of the large GNU/Linux distributors > > > switching to a compiler different from FSF GCC for Itanium.) > > > > Surely this depends on relative performance ... > > My guess is that there are more important things than performance, > such as stability, community support, maintenance burden, etc. > > Or let's put it this way: Would AdaCore have the resources to > support two entirely different backends. Would it even want to > hire new engineers or let its existing work-force learn compiler > internals of another compiler to support just one target? I don't > think so.
In practice: depends how much sales volume is in question... I can certainly see one of the enterprise Linux distributors, i.e. the people who have customers really interested in ia64 performance, taking this step. In theory. In practice that'd mean mostly SuSE and Red Hat, which puts it in a different light given the people and policies involved. -- Daniel Jacobowitz CodeSourcery, LLC