Re: GCC for SPARC Systems

[Alexey Starovoytov <alexey dot starovoytov at sun dot com>]

On Thu, 9 Mar 2006, Rainer Orth wrote:

> Alexey Starovoytov <alexey.starovoytov@sun.com> writes:
>
> > We are pleased to announce the availability of GCC for SPARC (R) Systems
> > (GCCfss) at http://cooltools.sunsource.net/gcc/
> >
> > GCCfss extends GCC to be able to use
> > the optimizing Sun(tm) Code Generator for SPARC systems (SCGfss).
>
> A couple of questions:
>
> * Would it be possible to use the same technique for Solaris/x86 or
>   Linux/x86, too?  Both versions of Studio 11 provide libsunir.so as well.

It is certainly possible, but considered as not desirable.
As an engineer I can say that it wouldn't be too difficult to do the x86,
but I don't think it will happen any time soon.

> * Maybe it would be possible to perform further development on a vendor
>   branch in the GCC svn repository?  I'm not sure if this would require SC
>   buy-in, though.  Perhaps the changes might become acceptible for FSF GCC
>   at some point in time; there have been discussions over at
>   opensolaris.org about opening the sources to the Sun compilers.

Personally I'd like to arrange it as a gcc branch or contribute it
in some way, but my previous effort of much smaller scale (gcc2c) had
quite negative reception, so I don't expect any sort of approval.

Also I'd like to emphasize that "GCC for SPARC Systems" is trying to deliver
performance on SPARC cpus to those users who use plain GCC compiler there.
That's it.

I tried to explain my personal opinion of "gcc4ss vs gcc on sparc" on my blog:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/alexey

Please don't hesitate to ask questions.
I'll be glad to share the details of implementation and hope that few things
may be useful to GCC developers as well.

Thank you.

Alexey.

>
> Thanks.
> 	Rainer
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Rainer Orth, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University
>