Re: Toolchain and NetBSD 8

[Paul Koning <paulkoning%comcast.net@localhost>]

> On Jun 14, 2017, at 3:22 AM, Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 12:57:41AM +0000, John Klos wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> NetBSD 8 will be coming soon. The last time I checked, gcc on NetBSD 7 and
>> current still don't work on VAX. This means that there'll no longer be an
>> active version of NetBSD/VAX that can compile code.
>> 
>> Is anyone working on this? What needs to be done?
> 
> The state in -current is not that bad, it can compile quite a bit of
> pkgs natively. Perl needs work (floating point format issues, not compiler
> related), which blocks a lot other pkgs.

Does PERL assume float is IEEE format?  That would of course be a bad assumption, and if so, it would be their bug to fix.

> The hacks that Felix mentioned should be fixed, but currently they do not
> hurt a lot.

I remember reports of compiler crashes, and those of course would be compiler bugs to be fixed.  One of them had to do with mishandling FFS, for which I proposed a fix a while ago that recently was picked up by Felix.  What happens at times is that there are compiler issues that only get triggered by the right combination of compile flags (say, -O2) and/or the exactly right magic source code.

GCC/VAX has a maintainer but I'm not sure if he's been able to spend time on it recently.  Others can submit patches, of course; backend fixes are often not that hard to figure out.

	paul