egcs/Solaris status

[Russ Allbery]

Jeffrey A Law <law@cygnus.com> writes:

> To a point.  There's only so much we can do with buggy vendor tools.  In
> fact the status of the Solaris linker is such that no matter what we do
> the tools will not work.  ie, if we fix one bug all we do is introduce
> another because of lameness in the Sun tools -- there is currently no
> way to win.

As an aside to this discussion, from an outside observer who's been
planning on upgrading to gcc 2.95.1 and is having trouble following the
scope and nature of this problem and the tradeoffs involved in configuring
a Solaris host with GNU binutils vs. vendor binutils, could someone update
<URL: http://egcs.cygnus.com/install/specific.html > with the details of
this problem?

It currently lists a problem with the dynamic linker on Solaris 7, but it
sounds like this is yet a different problem, unless I'm not following the
discussion even more badly than I thought.

There is also a note on that page:

| all ELF targets (SVR4, Solaris, etc.)
| C++ support is significantly better on ELF targets if you use the GNU
| linker; duplicate copies of inlines, vtables and template instantiations
| will be discarded automatically.

which I assume is related to this, but it sounds like Solaris is more
badly broken than other ELF targets and possibly for additional reasons?

Figuring out what platforms to use GNU binutils on and what platforms to
use the vendor tools, and which specific tools to use on which platforms,
has always been one of the most difficult parts of installing gcc.  I
really appreciate the web documentation; it's made it much easier this
time around.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)         <URL: http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ >