MacOS build tool selections for JDK8

[David Katleman]

On 5/13/2013 1:21 PM, David DeHaven wrote:
>>> 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.
> In my experience it takes no work at all...

Anyone attempted to build/test hotspot using clang rather than gcc?

>> 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.
> The way Apple has developed their Mac OS X SDK, they never stop "supporting" a specific version of an OS. You can still build code that will run on 10.4 and later even with the 10.8 SDK (if targeting Intel), so ensuring our code will continue to work on 10.7 should not be a huge concern. That's what the -mmacosx-version-min argument is for.

Does this imply the underlying version of macosx doesn't matter, as long 
as you're using Xcode 4.6.1 (or what ever we have standardized upon for 
JDK8)  with -mmacosx-version-min=10.7?

That would solve our new machines always having the latest macosx issue, 
that is as long as our instance of Xcode is supported.  (the iOS-ifying 
of macosx)

         Thanks
                 Dave