RFC: GCC 4.4 criteria - add Fortran as primary language?

[FX Coudert]

[adding fortran list to CC]

>> According to the GCC 4.4 Release Criteria,
>> http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/criteria.html, only C and C++ are primary
>> languages. And thus only C and C++ regressions can be release  
>> critical.
>>
>> I propose to add Fortran to these languages.
>
> My first thought is does gfortran support and have
> similarly good test results on all primary and secondary
> platforms.

I'm trying here to summarize our testresults on primary and secondary  
platforms.

Primary platforms:
   * arm-eabi: don't know, can't find testresults posted for  
gfortran; last time arm-unknown-elf was reported, it had 8000+  
failures, most of them due to PR33947 (not Fortran specific) that was  
fixed since.
   * i386-unknown-freebsd: 1 FAIL / 23522 PASS (compared to C: 80  
FAIL / 3 XPASS / 47658 PASS)

   * i686-pc-linux-gnu: clean (compared to C: 7 FAIL / 48648 PASS)

   * i686-apple-darwin: clean (compared to C: 7 XPASS)

   * mipsisa64-elf: 32 failures reported; clean on mipsel-unknown- 
linux-gnu, relatively clean on mips-sgi-irix6.5 (72 FAIL, most of  
them due to the same, IRIX-specific complex support problem)
   * powerpc64-linux: 7 FAIL / 23641 PASS; the 7 FAILs are on the  
same testcase, a glibc issue, they should be XFAILed
   * sparc-sun-solaris: 58 FAIL / 23606 PASS; of the 8 testcases  
failing, 4 will be xfailed (denormal I/O not handled by system libc),  
and 2 are probably not actually a problem (gfortran.dg/stat_ 
{1,2}.f90, usually due to testsuite running under root or other  
priviledged id)
   * x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu: clean



Secondary platforms:

* hppa2.0w-hp-hpux11.11: 1 FAIL, probably libc bug
* powerpc-ibm-aix5.2.0.0: 53 FAIL, half of them suspected to be libc  
bugs; lack of AIX access has prevented us working on getting this one  
better
* powerpc-apple-darwin: 32 FAIL, 16 of them due to libc bugs
* i686-pc-cygwin: 13 FAIL, including 8 libc bugs
* i686-mingw32: no testing posted; gfortran is believed to be fairly  
good on mingw, since this is probably one of our most used targets,  
large number of people download prebuilt binaries linked from the GCC  
wiki
* ia64-unknown-linux-gnu: 2 FAIL (compared to C: 32 FAIL)
* s390-linux-gnu: clean


As you can see, the gfortran testsuite stresses dark corners of the  
libc (I/O and math of denormalized fp numbers, I/O of very large fp  
numbers, ...). More of these should be marked as XFAIL, but different  
versions of system's libc (and limited access to some targets)  
sometimes make it hard to know what exactly is to be XFAILed.

Some more progress could be made on bare metal targets, but that  
requires some help from people who actually have access or simulators  
set up. Some newlib targets are relatively clean, though: sh-elf has  
no failure at all, mipsisa64-elf has 32 failures, cris-elf has 231.  
Hans-Peter Nilsson started helping me progressing on these (PR 21185  
tracks these efforts), specifically on arm-elf, cris-elf, frv-elf,  
mipsisa64-elf and v850-elf.

As a Fortran maintainer, I don't feel strongly about being or not  
being listed as a primary language.

Thanks,
FX


-- 
François-Xavier Coudert
http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uccafco/