Recommended GCC version?

[David Holmes - Sun Microsystems]

Andrew,

Andrew John Hughes said the following on 06/20/08 09:35:
> I would hope one of the side effects of moving the JDK from a
> proprietary to a community-based Free Software model would be that it
> gets built, run and tested on a much wider range of platforms and
> compilers.  This has already started to happen.

Agreed - this is a good end goal. Meanwhile there are some 
practicalities to address.

> The reality is that people aren't going to download and build a
> specific copy of GCC just for OpenJDK, and distros will certainly want
> it to build with the GCC they use for everything else.

But are the Distros expecting/assuming that everything will work fine 
with their version of GCC? Who is expected to have done the testing? If 
something goes wrong who would be expected to fix it? Would the Distros 
patch the OpenJDK code with a workaround for their GCC version? Or would 
they grab a known working GCC version and rebuild using that?

Right now the reality is that these alternate compiler versions have not 
undergone extensive testing for the OpenJDK. Over time that will 
hopefully change, but for now - caveat emptor!

Cheers,
David Holmes