[haiku-development] Re: GCC 2 x GCC 4.


Am 13.08.2008 um 14:14 schrieb Bruno Albuquerque:
Now that we are able to have a dual system for running applications compiled with both GCC versions, I wonder if it would not be a good idea to compile Haiku with GCC 4 by default and provide the GCC 2 libraries. The reason being that this would be a clear signal to people that they should use GCC 4 from now on and considering we will have to do this at some point, now is probably a good time to do it.
I don't think this would be a wise decision given the time frame discussed for Alpha 1. There were gcc4-only issues in the past, so this better receive some more testing before a release.
So far, the Alpha has often been a bikeshed discussion of how we would like the first release to be. But there has not been much discussion of what will happen between Alpha 1 and R1. No one's stopping us from releasing an Alpha 2, say, three months after Alpha 1, showcasing new features such as GCC4. Not including it in Alpha 1 does not necessate postponing it to after R1.
We can even provide both tool chains and a way for developers to switch between the two if they wanted. WHat do you guys think?
We do provide both tool chains in buildtools/ for cross-compiling. But so far no one has reported gcc4 running on Haiku, whether on a gcc2 or gcc4 image. So right now there is nothing to switch there.
From a software porting perspective, it would be beneficial to have a gcc4 tool chain on Haiku because gcc2 doesn't fully support C99. Unfortunately no one has commented on what would need to be done to get either our GCC 4.1.2 or any more recent vanilla GCC ported to run on Haiku, including dropping the __BEOS__ define for those who wish.
Personally, unable to develop gcc4 software on Haiku I did not have a use case for doing gcc2 hybrid builds, but it's handy to use a hybrid build for running OpenSSH on a gcc4 image (which works just great). 

Andreas

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