Re: [RFC] type safe trees

["H. J. Lu" <hjl at lucon dot org>]

On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 10:06:15AM -0400, Richard Kenner wrote:
>     You're seriously telling me that you'd even consider using such a
>     machine as a develpoment platform?
> 
> For doing development work on the *compiler*, of course not, but it's
> often all you *have* for doing development of the toolchain.
> 
>     Surely everything is going to be cross-compiled until you've got
>     production hardware, a solid toolchain and a good chunk of the system
>     ported.
> 
> And that's my point.  You're going to be a in a difficult environment
> for quite a while.  Getting GCC bootstrapped is one of the best tests of
> the compiler that exists and is an early step.
> 
>     GCC has very good support for cross compiling. IMHO this is the reason
>     it can be rapidly ported to new targets.
> 
> Right.  And that's what I don't want to damage.
> 
>     Take a look at all the targets supported by gcc. I'd guess half of
>     those simply aren't capable of hosting gcc. 
> 
> Sure.  But I'm talking about those that *are*.  I'm talking about a new
> machines, meant to be marketting as a general development.  Indeed nothing
> I'm saying applies to the embedded environment: that environment isn't
> influenced at all by what language the compiler uses.

The new machine is no different from an embedded target in this regard.
Gcc will be ported first before the real hardware and OS exist. You
don't want to bootstrap gcc in a simulator and you can't build an OS
if there is no compiler :-(. It will be done by cross compiling. At
least, it is the case for IA64.


H.J.