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Here's an excerpt from a 2013 OpenBSD mailing list post about the state of
compilers, whose points still are still valid in 2016, and I think it has some
relevance to this submission. Assuming the upstream developers fail to deliver, it's up to us to fix
or workaround compiler problems as we encounter them; sometimes it's as
easy as finding out which patch has been commited upstream, but not
backported to the version we use; and sometimes it's a genuine issue
which may or may not have been reported in the latest compiler version,
and we are on our own. When this happens, we can only rely upon our
developer skills and intimacy with the compiler.
A few of our developers have, over the years, become unafraid of gcc,
and able to investigate issues, backport fixes, and fix or work around
bugs: I'll only mention niklas@, espie@, etoh@ and otto@, and hope the
few others will forgive me for not listing their names. This has not
been an easy road, to say the least. Now, another few of our developers
are working on building a similar knowledge of llvm. I wish them a lot
of luck, and I will try to join them in the near future.
In the meantime I am not sure they feel confident enough to support
switching the most popular OpenBSD platforms from gcc to llvm.
In a few months or years from now, things will be different...
...but there is something I wish would happen first.
An LTS release of an open source compiler.
Because all compilers nowadays are full of subtle bugs, but so many of
them than you can't avoid them as soon as you compile any nontrivial
piece of code, and because we can't afford to going back to assembly, we
need a compiler we can trust.
GCC, as well as LLVM, have Fortune 500 companies backing them, paying
smart developers to work fulltime on these projects.
Yet none of them dares to provide a long time support version. Bugs in
version N are fixed in version N+1, but new bugs are introduced. And
noone cares about trying to settle things down and produce a compiler
one can trust (because version N+1 runs 3.14% faster in the loonystones
benchmark which doesn't match any real life use case). Who cares?
Tomorrow's compiler will generate code which will complete an infinite
loop in less than 5 seconds; stay tuned for more accomplishments!
The free software world needs an LTS compiler. The last de-facto LTS
compiler we have had was gcc 2.7.2.1, and it is too old to compile
modern C and C++ code.
Should a free software LTS compiler appear (be it a gcc fork, or an llvm
fork, or something else), then OpenBSD would consider using it, very
seriously. And we probably wouldn't be the only free software project
doing so.
-- http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=137530560232232( Previous discussion of this post on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9322259 ) I like that this project is in-line with these same goals. |