ld-elf related problems

[alex]

b. f. wrote:
> Our base system compiler suite is stuck at a patched version of gcc
> 4.2 because of licensing issues
Thats absolutely *ridiculous* that we have to use stone age development 
tools because of stupid and trivial license politics.
This matter was also bought up in a recent thread by myself regarding 
binutils, seeing that the version of binutils that ships with freebsd is 
incapable of compiling applications like mplayer on amd64.

Is this the reason why people are pushing for llvm, just to avoid the 
GPL license type of later releases of the gnu c compiler and tools? 
Thats really sad. llvm has a long way to go before it can be considered 
a worthy competitor against gcc.

The newer versions of gcc probably produce better code than the ancient 
version shipped with freebsd. Yeah I am aware you can install newer 
versions from ports, but it is ridiculous to do this and it doesnt 
always work as planned (like the OP of this thread shows), I tried to 
use gcc44 in the past, most things compiled ok, I was having these sort 
of problems too with some binaries when running them, undefined symbols etc.

Linux is going to leave us for dust at this rate. The recent phoronix 
benchmarks comparing the recently released freebsd 8 against linux and 
solaris should be enough of an incentive to get this issue sorted. I am 
certain the OS will benefit from being compiled with a current version 
of gnu compiler.

It just seems like nobody wants to address this issue, the word 
stagnation comes to mind.