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[20080215]
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Article: Competition Among Open Source Compilers
Not exactly related to NetBSD, but definitely relevant:
David Chisnall's article
Competition Among Open Source Compilers
talks about some alternatives to the GNU C Compiler (GCC), and why
they are of interest to the operating system community (and thus
NetBSD, too). Mentioned candidates include TenDRA, the Portable C
Compiler (PCC), the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), clang. The
summary: ``Not having to rely on GCC is likely to benefit the BSD family quite a lot. GCC is designed fairly closely with GNU libc in mind, so the project is hesitant to accept improvements that don?t work with glibc (and, by extension, with most Linux systems).
Competition is usually a good thing; in open source projects, where ideas (and, ideally, code) can flow freely between the projects, everybody wins in the end. The more advanced architecture of LLVM makes it a good long-term bet for future systems, and the simple codebase of PCC makes it a good systems compiler. Both are likely to carve out a significant portion of market share in the next few years, giving developers more of choices for compiling their code.''
Those interested in trying PCC with pkgsrc can set
"PKGSRC_COMPILER=pcc", see
Jeremy Reed's blog entry
and the
the CVS commit log
for more information. Also, see (hear :) the
bsdtalk interview with Anders "Ragge" Magnusson.
[Tags: gcc, pcc]
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