All-
The question of what toolchain to use on MacOS when building JDK8 is in
play.
This is important because the decisions we make in the next few weeks
will be in place for the lifetime of JDK8, including all future JDK8
update releases.
I have a few different pieces of feedback at this point, and (due to my
own ignorance of the developer environment choices on MacOS), I'd like
to throw the discussion out to a larger audience of MacOS developers.
1) Use gcc as the build does today.
2) Use Clang.
3) Support both (since they should both compile the same source) but
identify Clang as the official tool.
4) Use Xcode (er - wait - isn't Clang a part of Xcode? Please correct
me if I am mistaken here....)
As part of the build-infrastructure team, my #1 concern is getting
solid, repeatable builds from the toolchain, every time, that that's
what I mean by 'official'.
If developers feel adventurous and want to run out ahead using bleeding
edge tools, good for them - have fun.
What we would like to define here is a solid baseline of what we use to
run the official from-scratch JDK8 builds. That said, I'd like to nail
down the tools used, and the specific version of the tools.
Thanks in advance for any feedback.
Tim Bell
Java Platform Group Infrastructure
