Support for different compilers
Magnus Ihse Bursie
magnus.ihse.bursie at oracle.com
Fri Jan 31 13:42:35 UTC 2014
I'm about to start addressing the issue of supporting different
compilers on the same platform.
The major driver for this project is the compiler upgrade that is about
to happen in JDK 9. On MacOS X, we will be switching from gcc to clang
as default compiler. However, a complete switch at a single time will
not be easy to orchestrate. Instead, we will be supporting both gcc and
clang in parallel. To do this properly, we will have to make sure that
the build system can understand the difference between "compiler" and
"platform".
Up until now, we've had only one supported compiler per platform, and
(more or less) a different compiler for every platform. In such
circumstances, code tends to be a bit murky -- should we test for gcc,
or for linux, or possibly both? Apart from the actual instances of
testing for compiler/platform, there have been no good framework to
support this notion of compiler vs platform.
My plan is to achieve the following end result for the user:
* A new configure flag, presumably --with-compiler-type which can be set
to any of the supported compiler types: gcc, clang, mscl, oracle-studio.
For every platform, there is a default that will be used if the flag is
omitted. Setting the flag to a non-supported combination will result in
a warning, if it is possible but untested (like gcc on solaris), or a
failure if it is impossible (e.g. mscl on linux is not available).
* If the flag is set to a non-default but possible value, we'll try to
locate a compiler of the given type.
* Alternatively, one can explicitely request a specific compiler binary
to be used by setting CC= and CXX=. Setting just one of them will result
in a warning, since a mismatch is likely in that case. In this case,
we'll test the given compiler to try to determine it's type. Failure to
properly determine the type will result in an error, since then we don't
know what we're dealing with.
* For users with special needs, maybe running some kind of special build
or a wrapper around gcc, it is possible to combine the two. In that
case, we'll use the binaries pointed to by CC and CXX, and will assume
that they are of the type given by the --with-compiler-type. We will
check if we agree with the classification, but if not, we will still
take the user's given type by face value and just inform the user of
this mismatch. In this mode, compile failures can occur even if
configure succeeded.
I'd appreciate any input or feedback on this solution.
For instance, is "compiler type" a good name, or would "compiler brand"
be better?
/Magnus
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