Re:OpenBSD 6.0, to be released September 1
by lmedinas on Monday July 25, 2016 @10:41AM
(#12158995)
Just curious if OpenBSD plans to continue to use the old gcc 4.2.1 or migrate to LLVM or even GCC 5.1. I can imagine the later is not compatible due to the license.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Changing the base system compiler is something that's not going to be done lightly. This post form openbsd-misc spells out why.
Re:OpenBSD 6.0, to be released September 1
by OrpheanBeholder on Monday July 25, 2016 @11:46AM
(#12159440)
LLVM doesn't support all the architectures that OpenBSD supports.
Re:OpenBSD 6.0, to be released September 1
by microcolonel on Monday July 25, 2016 @11:22AM
(#12159274)
It's difficult because GCC is pretty buggy, which makes it hard to follow recent stable releases. In addition, OpenBSD has a lot of exploit mitigations in their branch of the compiler which will take considerable effort to port to LLVM.
Still i can imagine they require recent compilers (w/ support for C++11) to build for example some ports like Chromium.
This means they rely on "old" compilers to compile "old" C code from the base.
The "old" compiler is for compiling the base system and xenocara. There are gcc4 and clang packages available. Some packages are build using those more modern compilers.
I.e. Chromium is build with clang (3.8) if I'm not mistaken.