On Dec 20, 2011, at 8:43 AM, Kelly O'Hair wrote: > On Dec 19, 2011, at 11:39 PM, Alex Strange wrote: > >>> If you are restricting your builders to Mac OS X 10.7 now, you can actually >>> cut over to using clang soon, since it has no known bugs compiling the JDK >>> (right Alex? I'm not completely hallucinating this right?) >>> >>> Regards, >>> Mike Swingler >>> Apple Inc. >> Clang works fine to compile jdk. However, the build for hotspot is very >> unclean and prints thousands of warnings, because clang enables more >> warnings by default than gcc. I resorted to building with "clang -w" as >> printing all the warnings actually resulted in a slower compile time than >> using llvm-gcc. >> >> Cleaning the build up will take some work, but you should look into it as >> Clang is a much faster compiler and uses a newer version of the compiler >> backend. > > Please don't fall into the trap of 'it compiles fine'. I'm all for using the > latest and greatest compilers, > but when it comes to building something like hotspot, just be very very > careful. > The fact that clang uses a newer compiler backend make me even more nervous > for hotspot and everyone's > code generation playing well together at runtime.
Of course, it needs to be tested - but Apple has a demonstrated history of not letting any legacy technologies live on for long, and I want to ensure that JDK8 is on a supported compiler when it comes time to ship. Changing compilers mid-product cycle is never fun. Regards, Mike Swingler Apple Inc.
