Removal of ICC (intel compiler) bits from mk

Anton Shterenlikht mexas at bristol.ac.uk
Thu Aug 19 20:26:50 UTC 2010


On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 11:35:48AM +0200, Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> 
> Quoting Dag-Erling SmÃ??rgrav <des at des.no> (from Thu, 19 Aug 2010  
> 11:16:23 +0200):
> 
> > Alexander Leidinger <Alexander at Leidinger.net> writes:
> >> If someone would get icc 11.x up and runnig as a port (similar to what
> >> we have for outdated icc version in the ports collection), I would
> >> have a look if my contact at Intel is still working there in a
> >> position which allows him to get a commercial license for us.
> >
> > Does that really matter?  We're not going to start building releases
> > with icc, are we?
> 
> It could matter for ports, I do not know if it matters for parts in  
> src. The commercial license is also the only way that we could get icc  
> installed on machines in the FreeBSD cluster (if there's interest to  
> have another compiler *for FreeBSD development* to check the source  
> against... the warnng and error messages are better that those of gcc,  
> I do not know how they compare to clang).

If one begins to mention FreeBSD clusters, and moreover FreeBSD HPC, then
this becomes a somewhat different discussion. One of the stubmling
blocks for HPC on FreeBSD (just one of many, perhaps not even the
major one) is a complete lack of good quality commercial compilers.
All weÃ'got is gcc or clang. Both are not really that great, and 
definitely inferior to commercial compilers, e.g. Intel. What IÃ'm
saying is that it would be great if Intel sold a compiler for FreeBSD.
I'd ve bought a copy. But from what others have said, my impression is that
the ICC port is unlikely to fill this void.

P.S. My interests and expertise are in computational mechanics, not in
compilers, so feel free to correct me if IÃ'm wrong.

P.P.S. Regarding FreeBSD HPC see also this thead:
 http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2010-August/220264.html  
(FreeBSD, GPGPU and OpenCL/CUDA)


-- 
Anton Shterenlikht
Room 2.6, Queen's Building
Mech Eng Dept
Bristol University
University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TR, UK
Tel: +44 (0)117 331 5944
Fax: +44 (0)117 929 4423


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