On Tue, Nov 01, 2005 at 07:05:24PM +0000, Sean Sprague wrote:

> <IMO>
> 
> It took a great deal of hard work indeed by the OpenSolaris 
> guys to get Sun Studio to be made available FOC to members 
> of the OpenSolaris Community. Prior to that, it cost 
> thousands of dollars for the licence. And it still costs 
> thousands of dollars to people/companies that are not 
> members of the OpenSolaris or EDU communites.
> 
> I would strongly suggest that if you are new to OpenSolaris, 
> that you use Sun Studio 10.
> 
> I would ditch the GCC-related files, get ahold of the ones 
> that will build under Sun Studio 10, and go from there.

I mean no disrespect, because the first part of what you say is true.
However, it also took a great deal of hard work to port ON to gcc,
test it, and make the modified sources available while we finish
getting the changes putback.  Among the fruits of this labour is a
legitimate choice in compilers, and I would do nothing to discourage
anyone from using whatever compiler he prefers, or from using both and
gaining valuable information about their performance characteristics.
You may have noticed, if you are following them closely, that the gcc
source drops and the "regular" source drops have been converging over
time.  In the near future, the gcc-specific drops will be gone, their
changes integrated fully into ON.  The choice of compilers is not
going away, nor are the improved code quality and portability that
choice brings to us.

One of your implied assertions is factually incorrect: that the gcc
sources won't build with Studio 10.  That's not true; we build
gcc-gate with both compilers every day and both builds receive
testing.  In fact it is the "regular" sources that are defective in
this regard; unlike the "gcc" sources, they are not portable across
compilers.

I'll leave the question of correlation between cost and performance
for another day.

-- 
Keith M Wesolowski              "Sir, we're surrounded!" 
Solaris Kernel Team             "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!" 
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