Hey Eric, Eric Gallager via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
Hi, at Apple's WWDC this year they have announced that they are doing yet another architecture transition, so I was wondering what exactly would be the best way to go about adding support for it? The first issue would be just what to call the new architecture; it seems to be ARM-based, but there might be some proprietary extensions, so arm-apple-darwin or aarch64-apple-darwin might not work?
the triple name is probably the least of our worries :)
The next issue would be how exactly to go about adding support for it: Apple had arm-apple-darwin support for gcc in their version of gcc-4.2 that I don't think they ever contributed back upstream, but that was for iOS, so I doubt it could just be forward-ported, and even if it could, previous attempts to grab stuff from Apple's version of gcc-4.2 have faltered for legal reasons, so that could also be a factor here.
Even if it were legally permissible (IANAL, but my understanding is it’s not) it would not be viable techncially, there’s just too much difference between 4.2 and 11.
I’m guessing it might be better instead to just start afresh from scratch?
I’d expect that to be the only option, and that would be assuming that the new platform was Mach-O or ELF based, and that the code for the assembler / linker remains public and there’s enough information on the ISA variant in use, and, and …
Anyways, I’m interested to hear what people are thinking.
Assuming the things mentioned above, it’s technically feasible to make or update a port … …doing a complete port from scratch would be far more viable it if was someone’s ‘Day-job’ .. absent that, then it’s going to take a loooooong time, I expect. cheers Iain
