[Toybox] The new gcc 9 bug you pointed out.

[Rob Landley]

On 5/8/19 5:12 PM, scsijon wrote:
> So we can expect toybox to be fully llvm/clang compatable soon, or is it already
> so now.

Fully for a while now. Android's been building it with llvm for years now, and
the Android NDK I've been testing with has been llvm for as long as I've had it
working.

Android started using clang something like 2013, and switched to building
_everything_ with clang in the "N" release. That was a release or two back now:

https://blog.linuxplumbersconf.org/2016/ocw/system/presentations/3681/original/LPC16%20-%20AOSP%27s%20switch%20to%20Clang(2).pdf

> I also want to try some of the smaller ones like pcc and tcc with
> toybox,

I was trying both of those for a while, but I stopped.

I was maintaining my own tcc fork to try to teach it to build real things,
including (at the time) busybox and the kernel. It doesn't do dead code
elimination, without which it'll at _best_ suck in the whole of lib/*.c even for
"true". (Grischka is a windows developer, he doesn't care about Linux much that
I've seen. He told me he didn't understand my todo items, and I'm unaware of any
of the stuff I was working on making any progress since
http://landley.net/code/tinycc/ .)

Feel free to poke at pcc. I'm still subscribed to their mailing list but it's
like 3 posts/month...

> for me gcc is getting too big and complicated for a compiler, it's time
> they considered archiving out some of it to an external component.

Richard Stallman explicitly rejected that approach 20 years ago.

  https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2000-01/msg00572.html

GCC being a giant tangled hairball was a DESIGN GOAL to prevent it from becoming
modular so the front-end and back-end could be decoupled and replaced with code
under a different license. (Which is how llvm was initially developed anyway:
there was a gcc front-end and then clang was written to replace it. So
stallman's policy hurt gcc without preventing what he was afraid of.)

Note that llvm development started when gcc went gplv3. Just like Apple wrote
its own samba replacement when samba went gplv3. There's no such thing as "the
GPL" anymore and the fragmented pieces seem unlikely to outlive the generation
of developers that grew up using it back when there _was_ a single unified GPL.

But in the meantime, we've gotta suffer through maintaining or interfacing with
legacy software until y2k or y2038 or whatever knocks it out...

Rob

(I do wonder if y2038 will be an excuse to replace a lot of legacy GPL software
the same way Y2K was an excuse to replace so much legacy cobol. If so, what's
replacing the Linux kernel? 19 years left to figure that out, I suppose...)