Sparc64 support

[Jordan Hubbard]

> On Aug 9, 2015, at 2:54 PM, Peter Jeremy <peter at rulingia.com> wrote:
> 
> At this stage, it's not clear that SPARC has the critical mass of interest
> needed to ensure its ongoing viability.  Continuing to support an
> architecture incurs a non-zero cost to the Project as a whole so continuing
> to suppport SPARC needs to demonstrate a benefit to justify that cost.
> 
> The costs include:
> - Whilst sparc64 remains tied to gcc4.2.1, FreeBSD as a whole can't take
> advantage of newer C constructs.

I can speak to that a bit…  I went through a bit of a kerfuffle with the project when I was agitating to get libdispatch incorporated into base so that the project could have a decent multi-threading programming paradigm (with none of the perils of pthreads) at its core on which to build future async, multicore-aware applications.  That was’t just a pipe dream, either, as I watched that exact evolution occur (and continue) in OS X and iOS.  It’s tried and tested and it Just Works across a wider application base than any Unix-derived system to date has ever even contemplated, much less achieved.

However, the need to support non-blocks aware compilers basically killed the notion of pursuing that in the project.  Yes, you can use libdispatch without blocks, but it’s far less useful that way, and since my personal needs are more than met by the amd64 architecture, one that by any metric has become dominant in the industry, it was simply far more logical to pursue that work in a fork (again!) and I stopped agitating for it.

Now, should FreeBSD start insisting that clang support is mandatory to be a tier 1 architecture and that tier 2 architectures should build with external toolchains (on which they can also build with NO_FOO where FOO is any feature that requires clang) then perhaps that might be a good time to start thinking about bringing some of the OS X technologies back into the fold.  Until then, FreeBSD will of necessity be occupying a niche somewhere in-between the original FreeBSD, where we made a deliberate choice to focus on Intel and only Intel, and NetBSD.

- Jordan