Alternatives to gcc (was Re: gcc 4.3: when will it become standard compiler?)

[Pegasus Mc Cleaft]

On Sunday 01 February 2009 02:59:39 David O'Brien wrote:
> > gcc43 is fairly painless through the ports, but this is of limited use as
> > it will use the base assembler, linker, et al. Even if you install, as I
> > have, the latest binutils from GNU, it will locate /usr/bin/as before
> > /usr/local/bin/as. If you set all the enviroment varables (AR, AS, NM,
> > ...) before you do the build, you run into other problems with finding
> > the bootstrap files later due to the naming problems between
> > "x86_64-obrien-freebsd" and the auto-generated
> > "x86_64-unknown-freebsd8.0" from the GNU configure. In short, I found
> > upgrading the dev-chain a real nightmare.
>
> Its not that bad.  I've created several cross toolchains in the past.
> For those you specify which 'as' and 'ld' to use - how else do you think
> they work.  I don't think you configured your GCC properly if you cannot
> get it to use some binutils from /usr/ports.
>
> In fact when installing GCC on Solaris GCC strongly prefers (or use to)
> gas and gld to Sun's as and ld.  Just tweak that configure logic.

Your probably right... 

What I found is that the port of gcc43 uses the target name of *-portbld-* and 
the default from binutils uses *-unknown-*.. When the configure script runs, 
it misses that you may have a matched tool chain, so uses the /usr/bin/* 
tools. 

I created a port for binutils-2.19 that uses the same target string as the 
gcc43 version does. With that installed, the gcc43 tools pick up on it and 
everything seems happy. Hopefully it will be accepted.. Just waiting 
<chuckles>  

~Peg