svn commit: r264042 - in head: include lib/libc/gen lib/libc/include lib/libc/stdlib

[Jordan Hubbard]

On Apr 4, 2014, at 5:55 PM, David Chisnall <theraven at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> We'd like to kill off gcc 4.2.1 in base, because it doesn't support C11 or C++11. The lack of C++11 support is a problem because it means gcc architectures can't build libc++, so they need to use an old libstdc++ to build C++ things in the base system (which also means that these things can't take advantage of C++11, which cleans up the language a huge amount).  The prerequisite for this is the availability of external toolchains for the non-clang platforms.  If we could build base with gcc47 from ports, that would be okay, because then we'd have a modern C/C++ compiler in the base system and a modern(ish - 4.8 / 4.9 would be better, but 4.7 is a reasonable baseline) C/C++ compiler in ports to drive an external toolchain.

Ah, OK.  And I’m guessing there’s been no interest in forward-porting the blocks support to 4.7?  That’s kind of…  a bummer.  I’m guessing the great white hope for all the platforms is a slow convergence on clang then?  What is the compiler toolchain master plan?  If there’s a wiki somewhere describing it, I’d also be happy to just go read that.

> For embedded uses, we'd also like to build FreeBSD with vendor's-ugly-hacked-up-gcc-of-the-week.  This is less of an issue now for ARM, but MIPS vendors still hack up gcc in such a way that there's no way that they can get their changes upstreamed and then ship the result with their chips.

I see.  That’s pretty ugly indeed - is there a list of FreeBSD MIPS folks doing this somewhere?  I ask out of curiosity to know if there’s any collective attempt to chain them all together and insist that they improve clang/MIPS to the point where they can stop doing ugly-ass gcc ports. :)

Thanks for all the info.  It’s very helpful!

- Jordan