Good afternoon!
I've been hacking away at riscv64 support and noticed how bad of a state our
stdc library is.
https://git.haiku-os.org/haiku/tree/src/system/libroot/posix/glibc
We're pretty much on our own at this point since we based our libc on
an *old* version of glibc with a ton of backports / patches.
Now... while I think we're stuck with this glibc for a while due to gcc2 abi,
we might be able to make some improvements around our modern gcc
builds.
musl is a lightweight libc which compiles on Haiku *today* with zero
modification.
Pros:
* musl is MIT licensed (vs LGPL for glibc)
* musl advertises being lightweight and standards-compliant
* Small simple codebase
* glibc compatibility is high
* literally generates .a static libraries by default.
* No longer a "special forked glibc", aka less work.
* Would make llvm / clang builds of Haiku easier in the future.
Cons:
* Not as compatible with glibc as glibc.
* No m68k support :-(
* No riscv64 support (in progress)
My thoughts are:
leveraging a build package musl from a hpkg while linking libroot on gcc7+
leveraging our in-tree glibc on gcc2.
Seems like a clean solution...
Thoughts?
At face value it doesn't seem like we would need a large amount of change to do
this.
-- Alex
