On Thu, 9 Mar 2006, Daniel Berlin wrote: > > > > * Maybe it would be possible to perform further development on a vendor > > > branch in the GCC svn repository? I'm not sure if this would require SC > > > buy-in, though. Perhaps the changes might become acceptible for FSF GCC > > > at some point in time; there have been discussions over at > > > opensolaris.org about opening the sources to the Sun compilers. > > > > Personally I'd like to arrange it as a gcc branch or contribute it > > in some way, but my previous effort of much smaller scale (gcc2c) had > > quite negative reception, so I don't expect any sort of approval. > > Honestly, i doubt you would ever get it. At a bare minimum, i'd expect > nobody would even consider it until the sources to Sun's compilers were > GPL'd or put under a GPL compatible license[1].
Agree. GPLing of Sun compilers may happen one day. There are discussions and there are rumors. Who could expect the GPLing of Niagara chip? > > Also I'd like to emphasize that "GCC for SPARC Systems" is trying to deliver > > performance on SPARC cpus to those users who use plain GCC compiler there. > > Right. and instead of taking the route that other companies like IBM, > and recently, Intel and HP, have taken, which is to work *with* the GCC > community, and improve GCC, Sun apparently has decided to just work > around it. At the same time Intel and IBM working towards making their proprietary comilers to accept GNU extensions, ABI, etc. No question which approach takes higher stake. Sun is also trying to adjust its compilers to accept some gnuisms. This gcc4ss release is evaluation release. We hope that many solaris/sparc users appreciate the performance and then we'll see what would be the further steps. So far we hope to able to release gcc4ss with some delay after each gcc release. > It is one thing to say that short term, you need to do something else > (like hook up GCC to ORC or something) because GCC won't improve fast > enough. But as far as i can tell Sun has absolutely no long term goal > to actually attempt to improve GCC so they don't need to do these kinds > of things. If Sun starts improving GCC backend now it will never be able to catch up with Sun's own backend. I guess it will be easier to opensource Sun's backend at the end. When you're a company like Intel with a relatively small gap between gcc on x86 and icl, it's worth improving the gcc backend, but on Sparc the gap is much wider, so the effort to bridge it may not be justified from a resource point of view. Personally I wouldn't mind working towards improving gcc sparc backend. Actually we are fixing gcc own bugs and contribute them back. Alexey.
