Hi, I am new to haiku, I just tested it for a few days, compiling it from source. It is a very nice system so I am planning to use it for a while, at least … I think it has a future, there is nice community and is already usable.
I am still testing and reading around but if I got it correctly the first official release (R1) for x86 will be based on the ancient gcc 2.95 to keep binary compatibility with BeOS/ZETA software and distributed only in binary form, while future releases will be gcc4 based. For non-x86 platforms instead only gcc4 build are supported.
Also on x86 is possible to build haiku with gcc4 but it is not ‘officially’ supported.
That is why my first builds were gcc2/hybrids, I also tried a gcc4 hybrid, just to see how did it perform. Currently trying to compile haiku on haiku with gcc2 fails with some internal gcc errors and I guess that since probably noone is going to fix gcc 2.95 sources, the problems will be fixed by workaround in haiku sources to avoid compiler problems.
This made me wonder if it makes sense to build and use a gcc4 (maybe hybrid), ok, it won’t be possible to use old binaries and software from haikuware distributed without sources, but that is not a big problem for me, basically I spend most time programming and browsing the internet and I don’t have any old binaries to run…
What are the pro and the cons of using a gcc4 haiku on x86 (beside binary compatibility with old programs)?
Gcc4 isn’t stable so programs you compile with it won’t work in a few weeks to months as it changes… also pretty much no difference in speed when building the kernel with gcc4 so its not a big deal.
Haiku cross compiles from Linux and FreeBSD fine… I suspect that support for building on Haiku itself isn’t quite as well tested, I’ve never used it myself, but it is a feature at this point so report the bugs if they aren’t already!
go to http://dev.haiku-os.org to report the bugs you’ll need an account there if you haven’t one.
You actually might want to jump on IRC and talk to the guys on there about it since it is something that should work it may well be just a mistake on your part or some step that isn’t quite right in the documentation.
[quote=cb88]
Haiku cross compiles from Linux and FreeBSD fine… I suspect that support for building on Haiku itself isn’t quite as well tested, I’ve never used it myself, but it is a feature at this point so report the bugs if they aren’t already![/quote]
Haiku has been self hosting for many years now and most developers do code directly in Haiku for just as long. I’m not aware of any problems compiling gcc2hybrid images from within Haiku. Did so myself just yesterday…
What you have to be careful however, “cross-compiling” a newer trunk version within an older Haiku revision can be problematic. When you stumble over these issues, try compiling from a nightly image of (roughly) the same revision.
