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by boondaburrah 1587 days ago
Yeah the problem isn't nearly as pronounced for rust, since rustup exists and rust itself isn't really available on any platforms you can't just update the toolchain yourself.

C++ has a lot more tangled dependencies going on especially when you're stuck with a vendor's compiler.

Make no mistake: the problem here isn't necessarily technological.
1 comments
jcelerier 1587 days ago
I don't understand what would be an environment where you could fetch the latest rust from internet but not the latest clang. I do my builds on centos:8 (well, rockylinux now) and it has access to the latest GCC 11. On Debian derivatives llvm itself provides up to date repos and on Windows, llvm-mingw works perfectly.
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boondaburrah 1585 days ago
Generally, an environment where you can't use clang /at all/. There are many C++ compilers.
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jcelerier 1585 days ago
but this does not make sense. If you can't even change the C++ compiler you use you can't write non-C++ code (e.g. Rust) either.

Otherwise let me just fork Clang into the "Gnalc" compiler for the "Sulpsulpees" language which happens to be exactly compatible with the programming language that the clang++-13 binary supports. Takes me a whole 15 minutes, most of which will be taken by forking the LLVM repo on github, and I can guarantee than porting to it will be less effort than porting to Rust. I can even provide the backing of a proper non-profit foundation established on two continents for your legal team's needs.

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boondaburrah 1584 days ago
The reason you can't use clang is not a technical one, but that you are /required/ to use the platform's provided C++ compiler.

And yes, you are making my point. We are in violent agreement.

You can't write Rust either, which is why C++ support would be initially exciting, until you learn you can't use just any C++ compiler and the one you can use is excluded.

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jcelerier 1583 days ago
Who has such stupid requirements ? What's the "platform" compiler for something that provides GCC up to 11, like centos ?
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boondaburrah 1582 days ago
Embedded stuff usually, game consoles. Also if you have an Enterprise SKU of Visual Studio it costs real money to upgrade. Maybe your company has purchased a compiler suite you have to use. Maybe you have to link against proprietary libs that were only provided for a certain MSVC ABI.
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