I don’t know if this has crossed anybody’s mind, but I’ve noticed that since ZETA and BeOS seem to have problems with any GCC’s newer than 2.95, maybe it’s time to make a compiler for the BeOS family (including Haiku) that may be able to keep compatibility with the newer GCC4 build, making way for an easier dev path. What I propose is making a new compiler with compatibility among the related OSes not much of an issue. Maybe you could make a BeGCC4 by taking the 2.95 codebase, and merge parts of GCC4 with it, of course adding other enhancements. The main reason I’ve brought this up because it seems that the path with the hybrid builds seems to compromise too much. Or, if that is impossible, perhaps write an all new one from scratch, then you can further distance yourself from GNU GPLed things. Just some food for the thought for people like me.
I suspect, releases after Haiku R1, the old GCC2 compatibility will simply be dropped, and so will the “hybrid” builds. This has already been alluded to by several of the core developers for a long period of time.
In the future, perhaps LLVM/Clang will be used instead - it remains to be seen. It seems this is the path the BSD folks as well as OSX seems to be headed.
1 Like