Gcc 4.2.1 to be removed before FreeBSD 13, a firm timeline reddit / BSD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Bardo_Pond · 2019-08-13 20:21 Long past due, it's been talked about for a while so I'm glad they are giving firm dates. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- theSarif · 2019-08-13 21:01 I remember the day when people thought GCC would never go away. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mcnst · 2019-08-13 22:00 Yes, same here; TBH, it wasn't all that long ago… I remember attending the LLVM/Clang talk at BSDCan 2008 when it was a brand new thing; fun times! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- raevnos · 2019-08-13 23:54 **4.2**?!? That's what they've been using as a system compiler? Good riddance. It's only 12 years old... No C11, no C++11 much less newer versions of the languages... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- euphraties247 · 2019-08-13 23:58 No GPL 3 as well ---------------------------------------------------------------------- emaste · 2019-08-14 01:05 Tier-1 architectures have been using Clang as the system compiler (and not shipping GCC at all) for years, this is for some of the tier-2/3 archs. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-08-14 08:14 Is they're a lack of advancement or development for the GNU gcc platform? Why are so many security professionals and OSes moving away from it? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cjg_ · 2019-08-14 11:07 gcc has improved a lot, but FreeBSD is stuck on pre GPLv3 versions for inclusion in base. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-08-14 19:56 Oh the licensing, got it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Kernigh · 2019-08-15 04:33 LLVM and clang work well with arm and x86, but have trouble with other arches. Apple uses clang on arm and x86. Google's Android uses clang on arm and x86. Most BSD users have arm or x86 hardware. For them, clang works well. OpenBSD still uses gcc 3.3.6 or 4.2.1 on some arches. I have an old or slow PowerBook G4 with OpenBSD/macppc, where gcc 4.2.1 is the base compiler. The ports tree used gcc 4.2.1 to build gcc 8.x, and gcc 8.x to build clang 7.x. (My last build was months ago, before the update to clang 8.x.) I needed to use gcc 8.x to build most C++ code, because gcc 4.2.1 is too old for C++11, and clang 7.x causes problems. DragonFly and NetBSD use recent GPLv3 versions of gcc, so they don't need to keep ancient versions of gcc to work around clang problems. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dannomac · 2019-08-20 15:37 Yup. Nothing technically wrong with GCC. In fact, it's the out of tree compiler for some architectures (IIRC Sparc and RISC-V). It just can't be in base because GPLv3 is forbidden.