Alternatives to gcc (was Re: gcc 4.3: when will it becomestandard compiler?)

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 3:22 PM -0800 1/31/09, Pedro F. Giffuni wrote:
>--- On Sat, 1/31/09, Mark Linimon <linimon at lonesome.com> wrote:
>
>On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 01:08:54PM -0800, Pedro F. Giffuni wrote:
>  > > The effort didn't go far enough. Why haven't we removed GNU
>  > > readline ?
>  >
>  > Probably either because someone hasn't written a BSD-licensed
>  > one, or someone hasn't done the work to test-compile src and
>  > ports on all the appropriate architectures.
>
>Wrong on both:
>
>- libedit has a readline compatibility mode that has replaced
>   GNU readline in the other BSDs.

One minor datapoint:  I use readline in some program that is used
by several people on several platforms.  One of those users was on
MacOS 10 (iirc), and used the libedit which was on that platform.
While it could be made compile-time compatible with readline, it
wasn't a completely adequate replacement for this program of ours.

The guy who tried this said it was because our program takes
advantage of knowing some of the internals of what readline is
doing, so it can implement a few extra features.  Now, that can
easily be said to be "the fault" of our program, but who's to say
that other programs don't do the same thing?  As such, libedit is
not necessarily a drop-in replacement for libreadline.  Someone
would have to do the legwork, and certainly I don't feel like
doing that legwork.  I don't even feel like fixing that one program
of my own.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu