Permissive licensed toolchain

[Erik Cederstrand]

Den 30/05/2010 kl. 16.15 skrev C. Bergström:

> What's the real status of a fully permissive licensed toolchain?

You mean ClangBSD?

> 1) Benchmarks - (I mean emperical evidence on FBSD and per target with no anecdotal comments or speculation.. I admit benchmarks can actually be misleading since many companies optimize for them specifically)

I'm working (slowly) on comparing FreeBSD and ClangBSD for various benchmarks.

> 3) Which assembler is being used?

The same as FreeBSD: GNU as. There is ongoing work in the llvm-mc project to provide an assembler for LLVM, but ELF support is low priority for Apple. There was an experimental patch on the mailing list a couple of weeks back.

> 4) Which linker is being used?

GNU ld. LLVM also provides a linker, but last time I checked it wasn't functional on FreeBSD. It provides LTO that would be interesting to benchmark.

> What's the best way to make a plan which will get feedback if someone wanted to try alternative approach to the above?

Make it easily available, e.g. as a Subversion repo like ClangBSD, or an install CD, and provide instructions for easy installation and test. I'm testing ClangBSD in a VirtualBox VM which makes it easy to recover after hosing the operating system.

Erik