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

[David O'Brien]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 11:46:29AM -0000, Pegasus Mc Cleaft wrote:
>    In my, probably ill informed opinnion, the problem we are facing is not 
> a C compiler problem, its an assembler problem. We can install a better C 
> compiler of our choice through the ports, but its the base assembler & 
> linker that lets us down because it dosent know about modern CPU opcodes 
> and registers (IE: SSE4.x).
..
> gcc43 is fairly painless through the ports, but this is of limited use as 
> it will use the base assembler, linker, et al. Even if you install, as I 
> have, the latest binutils from GNU, it will locate /usr/bin/as before 
> /usr/local/bin/as. If you set all the enviroment varables (AR, AS, NM, ...) 
> before you do the build, you run into other problems with finding the 
> bootstrap files later due to the naming problems between 
> "x86_64-obrien-freebsd" and the auto-generated "x86_64-unknown-freebsd8.0" 
> from the GNU configure. In short, I found upgrading the dev-chain a real 
> nightmare.

Its not that bad.  I've created several cross toolchains in the past.
For those you specify which 'as' and 'ld' to use - how else do you think
they work.  I don't think you configured your GCC properly if you cannot
get it to use some binutils from /usr/ports.

In fact when installing GCC on Solaris GCC strongly prefers (or use to)
gas and gld to Sun's as and ld.  Just tweak that configure logic.

-- 
-- David  (obrien at FreeBSD.org)