On May 10 2013, at 15:16 , Tim Bell wrote: > All- > > The question of what toolchain to use on MacOS when building JDK8 is in play. > > This is important because the decisions we make in the next few weeks will be > in place for the lifetime of JDK8, including all future JDK8 update releases. > > I have a few different pieces of feedback at this point, and (due to my own > ignorance of the developer environment choices on MacOS), I'd like to throw > the discussion out to a larger audience of MacOS developers. > > 1) Use gcc as the build does today.
Does this mean the gcc+clang provided by XCode or some random port of GCC (fink/macports)? I would be concerned with using "cygwin quality" (if that doesn't make you cringe you haven't been using cygwin long enough) GCC port rather than the Apple port. > 2) Use Clang. Is there any way to get clang for MacOS other than via XCode? Like using macports or fink GCC port I would be concerned about quality, stability and updates. > 3) Support both (since they should both compile the same source) but identify > Clang as the official tool. We're currently using the gcc front end. I think it would take signifiant work to switch to the clang front end. > 4) Use Xcode (er - wait - isn't Clang a part of Xcode? Please correct me if > I am mistaken here....) This seems to be the only supported option. For Java 8 we have a mandate to support 10.7 which the current XCode tools allow us to do. I assume that the requirement to support 10.7 will remain through all of Java 8's support lifetime. It's unclear when XCode will stop supporting 10.7 though it would seem that when/if that happens we will be stuck with the last-supporting-10.7 version. > As part of the build-infrastructure team, my #1 concern is getting solid, > repeatable builds from the toolchain, every time, that that's what I mean by > 'official'. > > If developers feel adventurous and want to run out ahead using bleeding edge > tools, good for them - have fun. > > What we would like to define here is a solid baseline of what we use to run > the official from-scratch JDK8 builds. That said, I'd like to nail down the > tools used, and the specific version of the tools. > > Thanks in advance for any feedback. > > Tim Bell > Java Platform Group Infrastructure >
