Why do a great many targets disable libgcj by default in the toplevel
configure.ac?
Where GCC provides a runtime library for a given language, I'd think the
compiler isn't particularly useful without the library - and so if the
compiler is built for that language, an attempt should be made to build
the library, with a build failure if it isn't supported. This is the
situation with Go, for example - if you try to build with Go enabled for a
target to which libgo hasn't yet been ported, you get a build failure in
libgo telling you that the configuration you asked for isn't yet
supported.
Thus, I'd think that the disabling of libgcj by default on many targets
should be removed. If it genuinely doesn't work on a given target, then
the right setting is
unsupported_languages="$unsupported_languages java"
though I'm not sure unsupported_languages works quite the right way (in my
view, it should only disable inclusion of a language in
--enable-languages=all; if you explicitly specify an unsupported language,
it should still try to build it). (And why (CC to maintainer) do some
CRIS and MMIX targets list Fortran in unsupported languages? I didn't
think the Fortran libraries had any porting issues, unlike Java and Go and
Ada.)
--
Joseph S. Myers
[email protected]
