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Re: Apple specific options: patch to include them in the current release gcc?


On Jan 27, 2005, at 7:18 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:

Remy X.O. Martin wrote:
Hello,
Apple has added a number of options to their gcc compilers which are quite necessary when building Cocoa/Carbon applications, and esp. when used with XCode; among others, -F <framework path>, -framework <name> and a few more. The framework related options *can* be emulated, but that's quite tricky.
Is anyone here aware of a set of patches that would introduce the (most important) Apple-specific options into gcc? I reckon there's a reason they're not included in the mainstream gcc releases, but I think (without having checked) that Apple's version is available from OpenDarwin.org . In that case, patches *might* exist...
"Most important" has multiple interpretations. The full set of
Apple's changes is rather large, but many of the bits are only
needed to build OS X components, and not needed for applications
using OS X APIs.

And I suppose I should also make a general point: Apple does not want to keep any compiler changes to ourselves. It is in our interest to have as many of our changes as possible get into the mainline gcc tree. Every Apple local change means more engineering effort doing bookkeeping, merge maintenance, and similar drudgery. That sort of thing does not help Apple. The less of it the better.


As a general rule, the only changes we've made that we haven't put into mainline are:
- Patches we made under time pressure where we just plain haven't had time yet to get them up to GNU standards and submit them to mainline. There are a lot fewer of these than there once were.
- Patches that we've submitted and that have been rejected. (Example: Pascal strings. Apple needs this feature to compile legacy code, but the GNU community as a whole has decided that this feature doesn't fit into the overall technical direction that it wants for this compiler.)
- Patches that we haven't even bothered to submit because we're pretty sure they'd be rejected. (Example: alternate asm syntax that's more compatible with CodeWarrior and Visual C++.)


If there are any Apple local patches that you would like to see in mainline, please let us, and the gcc community as a whole, know about them. I would love to see mainline gcc be useful for building OS X applications. We aren't there yet, but we're a lot closer than we were a couple years ago.

--Matt



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