On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 11:31 AM John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <[email protected]> wrote: > I don't understand why it would be so important to deprecate ia64 so quickly > now given the fact that both Debian and Gentoo are actively working on the > port.
The IA-64 port has been broken on and off ever since we added some qsort checking. That happened in Sept 2017. So the port has been broken for about a year and a half now. Intel has already announced EOL for IA-64 in Fall of 2020. The next gcc release is spring 2020, so not clear that we need support for a soon to be dead processor. You can still use old gcc versions for IA-64, it just wouldn't be supported in new releases if it gets deprecated. I wasn't aware of a gentoo IA-64 effort, but checking, it looks like gentoo-ia64 has no email since October 2006. That doesn't look like an active project. > Is there anything that the ia64 backend is currently blocking in gcc? We still get bug reports for it. Someone has to answer the bug reports. If there is no dedicated IA-64 maintainer, then one of the global maintainers has to handle it, and they don't want to do this work. Sometimes we have to make global changes to gcc which require changes to multiple backends. The general process is to test every backend that is touched, but if you have to touch the ia64 backend, and the ia64 backend is broken, then you can't touch it. People don't like making blind changes that they can't properly test. There are some optimization passes and infrastructure features that are used primarily or only by the IA-64 backend. If we can deprecate the ia64 port, then we can perhaps deprecate these features, which then lowers the maintenance burden for people working on other parts of the compiler. This all hinges on whether the IA-64 port has a maintainer or not. If someone here wants to volunteer as the IA-64 port maintainer, then you can keep the port alive for a while longer. It is still likely to be deprecated eventually though. There are so many things that are different about IA-64 than everything else that gcc supports that this creates a maintenance burden even for people who aren't doing IA-64 work. So it is really only practical to keep it alive if it has value, and an EOL processor doesn't have much value. I was keeping the IA-64 alive for a few years by serving as a token maintainer, but my RISC-V work has increased to the point where I can't reasonably pretend to be the IA-64 maintainer anymore. So now that there is no official maintainer they want to deprecate it. If you care about this, I would suggest contributing to the thread on the gcc mailing list. Jim
