On Mon, 31 May 2010, Basile Starynkevitch wrote: > I would even imagine that later, one could configure GCC to have only a > C++ front-end, but no more a C one. That probably would be unusual, > since many important applications which want to be compiled by GCC (I am > thinking of the Linux kernel) will continue to exist in C. But I would > believe that a future GCC with only a C++ frontend and without a C > frontend would be possible, and be able to bootstrap (i.e. make stage3), > which is not true today. IIRC, today's GCC (i.e. 4.5) cannot even be > configured to have a C++ front-end without having a C front-end. Do we > want to change that?
I believe it would be a bad idea to change GCC's language-independent runtime libraries (libgcc etc.) and libraries for ObjC, Fortran etc. to use C++. As such, building the C compiler will continue to be required in order to build those libraries. (It should also continue to be possible to build a cross compiler that only supports C - using, of course, pre-installed build-x-build and build-x-host C++ compilers - rather than requiring C++ support to be built for the target; the requirement to build a C++ host-x-target compiler will only apply for native bootstrap.) -- Joseph S. Myers jos...@codesourcery.com
