GDC buildable on solaris?

[Iain Buclaw]

On Sunday, 13 March 2022 at 06:46:47 UTC, Chris Piker wrote:
> Hi GDC
>
> I'm temporarily working on an old solaris big-endian system, 
> which happens to have GCC 4.9.  I think this could be recent 
> enough to boot-strap gcc-11.2 (and of course gdc).  But before 
> I attempt to build gdc on such an odd beast, does anyone know 
> if gdc is big-endian safe?  Would it even be worth the attempt?
>
> Thanks ...and thanks for gdc.

1. Yes, the [minimum 
version](https://gcc.gnu.org/install/prerequisites.html) required 
to bootstrap latest version of gcc is 4.8 (ISO C++11 compiler).

2. Current mainline gdc requires a D compiler, so the minimum 
version to bootstrap is 9.1 - though preferably you should have 
at least 9.4 or 10.1 because of [belated 
bugs](https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=104749) that 
were discovered too late on some platforms when verifying their 
ability to bootstrap themselves.

3. gdc (and the dmd front-end) is big-endian and strict-alignment 
safe, sometimes upstream wobbles a bit an introduces regressions 
- there have been a few since 2.076..2.099 - but those have 
caught early enough in development that they are no longer a 
problem.

To highlight a couple examples in both the compiler and D runtime 
library.
https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/13324
https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/13703
https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/3774
https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/3775

4. gdc is routinely compiled and tested on Solaris 
[i386](https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-testresults/2022-March/756623.html) and [sparc](https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-testresults/2022-March/756625.html). An incoming merge is about to land that should reduce the number of fails tests in the dmd testsuite on sparc. (See the linked druntime patches ;-)