[RFC] Replace Java with Go in default languages

[Jeff Law]

On 11/09/13 04:12, Eric Botcazou wrote:
>> Right now Go does not build on a range of targets, notably including
>> Windows, MacOS, AIX, and most embedded systems.  We would have to
>> disable it by default on targets that are not supported, which is
>> straightforward (we already have rules to disable java on targets it
>> does not support).  But to the extent that there are options like
>> -fnon-call-exceptions that are tested primarily by Java and Go, we
>> would get less coverage of those options, since we would not test them
>> on systems that Java supports but Go does not.
>
> Let me make the case for Ada here: it's a general purpose, highly portable
> language, which is regularly built and tested on a significant range of
> platforms (I personally test it on x86/Linux, x86-64/Linux, PowerPC/Linux,
> IA-64/Linux, SPARC/Solaris and SPARC64/Solaris).  It exercices some features
> of the compiler that aren't exercised by other languages and stretches some
> common features much more than the other languages.  It turns out that it also
> enables -fnon-call-exceptions by default.  It seamlessly works with LTO.
I'd kindof always dismissed Ada because it was so slow in the past and 
the need for an installed Ada front-end.

Note the "slow" was back in the mid 90s last time I looked at it :-0  I 
haven't compared it to GCJ or anything like that, but that's certainly 
easily accomplished.

At least for Linux systems, the bootstrapping problem is largely a 
solved problem by the major vendors.

Let me run some tests, this may be a better alternative.

jeff