PCC and FreeBSD in the future?

[Ed Schouten]

I've been tracking PCC lately and it looks like development is going at
quite a fast pace and some people are really motivated to work on it
(Otto Moerbeek and Anders Magnusson being the two most active, as fas as
I can say).

One of the major obstacles for PCC is that it didn't support a way to
pack structures in a comfortable way. Most of the FreeBSD userland just
built with it. Most of the stuff that didn't compile properly, was
related to kernel headers, using __attribute__ stuff, instead of the
cdef'd stuff, like __packed. It seems things have changed in the mean
time.

I think PCC could serve as a replacement for GCC in the future, but only
for userland utilities first. The problem with library compilation is
that some libraries (like libc) use very compiler specific routines,
like inline assembly, etc.

I'll try the latest PCC snapshot one of these days and see how things
are progressing. Maybe I'll send in some diffs as well. I have to do
this on one of my older systems, as I'm running FreeBSD/amd64 on my main
machine and PCC doesn't support that yet.

Yours,
-- 
 Ed Schouten <ed at fxq.nl>
 WWW: http://g-rave.nl/
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