Status of ga68 in recent O/S package systems, and local builds

[Pietro Monteiro]

On Mon, May 25, 2026, at 2:12 PM, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
> This note reports O/S package systems that now include ga68:
>
> 	==========================================================
> 	System [and CPUs]		Package name(s)
> 	==========================================================
> 	Fedora 45 Rawhide [x86_64]	gcc-algol68 libga68-static
> 					[gcc-16 family]

Fedora 44 has gcc-algol68 and libga68-static too. I have only tested
aarch64 and x86_64, but it looks like x86 (i686), ppc64le and s390x
packages are available too.

> 	Ubuntu 26.04 [arm64, ppc64le,	gcc-15 gcc-16
> 	risc-v64, s390x, x86_64]
> 	==========================================================

Ubuntu 25.10 has the outdated gcc-15 based package. As usual the
Ubuntu packages come from Debian. Unfortunately Debian only has the
packages on testing and unstable.

> The only one of those on a big-endian system is the s390x version; I
> was happy to find that all of my own Algol 68 test suite passed all of
> its tests, and got identical output to that on x86_64.

Cool. Do you mind publishing your test suite?

> Perhaps list readers can add to that list.
>
> On Fedora, I found it necessary to install the libga68-static package;
> without it, linking of freshly compiled Algol 68 code fails.

Yes, ga68 uses static linking by default. We should report the bug to
Fedora.  They can either default to shared linking or depend on the
static lib.

> Checks on the latest DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and
> OpenSUSE releases have not found ga68 packages.
>
> I have done successful manual builds of ga68 on these systems:
>
> 	==========================================================
> 	System				Compiler version(s)
> 	==========================================================
> 	CentOS 7.5 [x86_64]		ga68-16, ga68-17
> 	Debian 12.14 [arm64]		ga68-16, ga68-17
> 	Debian 14 (forky/sid) [ppc64le]	ga68-17
> 	DragonFlyBSD 6.4.2 [x86_64]	ga68-17
> 	FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT [amd64]	ga68-17
> 	Ubuntu 24.04 [x86_64]		ga68-16, ga68-17
> 	Ubuntu 26.04 [x86_64]		ga68-16, ga68-17
> 	==========================================================
>
> The second of those is a physical Raspberry Pi, with 4-core 2.4GHz
> Cortex-A76 CPU, about the size of a deck of playing cards, but a bit
> thicker.

Thanks. I usually build on x86_64 and aarch64 linux.  One day I'll do
automated weekly builds and send regressions to the list.

> A gcc-17 build attempt on OpenBSD 7.9, released 19-May-2026, failed to
> build ga68: the native gcc compiler is version 15.2.0 (a big jump from
> the gcc-8.4.0 on OpenBSD 7.8), but alas, there is no corresponding g++
> compiler.  Attempts to use clang-19, clang-20, and clang-21 to build
> compilers from the gcc-17-20260517 snapshot on that system have all
> failed; it appears that a version of a genuine older g++ compiler is
> needed to build a current g++.

It should be possible to use clang to build GCC. I'll try it on an
OpenBSD host in the cfarm project machines and report back.

pietro

> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> - Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
> - University of Utah                                                          -
> - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe@math.utah.edu  -
> - 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe@acm.org  beebe@computer.org -
> - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: https://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe -
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------