On Mar 3, 2011, at 10:19, Jack Howarth wrote: > On Thu, Mar 03, 2011 at 09:48:40AM -0600, Ryan Schmidt wrote: >> > >> On Mar 3, 2011, at 09:40, Jack Howarth wrote: >> >>> Are there any plans to attempt to move MacPorts towards >>> building with clang once Xcode 4 is released? Considering that >>> we have so many packages supporting gcc4x variants to build with >>> FSF gcc, it seems strange not to do the same for clang. >>> Jack >>> ps I assume that Xcode 4 won't be held up until Lion is released so >>> these clang variants could be first done on Snow Leopard. It is unclear >>> from http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/whats-new.html >>> if the clang c++ support in Xcode 4.0 will use the existing libstdc++ >>> or the new libc++ instead. It would be nice if it were the latter. >> >> Ports build with the standard Xcode gcc compilers unless there is a good >> reason not to. The reason why many ports have variants to use MacPorts gcc >> compilers is not because they particularly want to use the MacPorts gcc C or >> C++ compilers, but because they want to use a Fortran compiler, which Xcode >> doesn't provide. > > That wasn't my experience. When I contributed the pymol packaging, some of > the other MacPorts > developers insisted on gcc4x variants despite the fact that pymol doesn't > contain any fortran code. > A clang variant still might be a nice idea to provide a test bed for finding > out which packages have > build issues and for filing reports or sending patches upstream. It is > unclear from the published > information on Lion what Apple's intentions are for clang/libc++ but I am > hoping they might be > aggressive and, while building Lion with gcc-4.2, configure the standard > system compilers to clang. > I believe we saw this done earlier in Mac OS X development (perhaps the > gcc-3.3 to gcc-4.0 > transition) where the Xcode defaulted to a newer gcc than was actually used > to build the matching > OS release.
The other reason some ports have gcc variants is because there is a desire to compile all related programs and libraries using the same compiler, to avoid hard-to-diagnose problems. So if a port uses a gcc variant in order to use a fortran compiler, it's possible everything depending on that port for its libraries will also need to use the same gcc compiler, regardless whether it itself uses fortran. _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-dev
