[haiku-development] Re: GCC2 and GCC4 on same System

Hi Stephan

> you have a history of putting things together and showing that they 
> actually work, don't you? :-)

Maybe I'm just the type of person who actually tries things first ;-).

> If I understood correctly, one of the bigger obstacles was to change 
> the 
> build system to support building a hybrid system/image in an 
> automated way. 
> But good to know that that seems to be the only bigger problem to be 
> solved. :-)

I haven't actually changed the build system. I have simply taken two 
images and "merged" them together by taking apps, add-ons and libraries 
from the GCC4 image and putting them into the GCC2 installation.
Doing this automatically could proove to have a bit more overhead, as 
it would require you to have the buildtools checked out and build both 
compilers (or have both compilers installed and configured). But I 
think it's absolutely possible to do so.

What we need to figure out now is how we want to layout such a hybrid 
image. I have put the libraries into an extra "lib" dir, as the 
runtime_loader will use this as a first step to find libraries. If we 
want to produce hybrid images, we could for example add a "lib4" 
directory to "/boot/beos/system" and then have the runtime_loader 
decide, based on the used compiler, which of "/boot/beos/system/lib" 
and "/boot/beos/system/lib4" to use to resolve symbols. The same is 
true for add-ons like Translators.

This approach will by the way probably not work for drivers as you 
cannot just use two kernels side by side. But I don't think it's a big 
issue to keep them either all GCC4 or all GCC2. If they use C++ at all, 
they will use it only very limited and they should stay compatible with 
GCC2 more easily than big applications.

Regards
Michael

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