darwin may lose primary target status on FSF gcc

[Jack Howarth]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 04:43:14PM -0500, Brian Barnes wrote:
> Regarding the discussion about gcc 4.5.0 problems on darwin and the  
> back-and-forth between Toby and Jack:
>
> I have just now caught up on this thread, and I want to echo my support 
> of pretty much everything Jack Howarth has said. I'm a long time user of 
> gcc/gfortran for high performance scientific computing. The HPC world 
> essentially revolves around two compiler suites: gcc and intel (although 
> a few other commercial compilers still have notable followings). Both 
> perform well on linux and OS X. Only one of them is free. If gcc (and 
> hence, gfortran) support on OS X and macports is allowed to stagnate and 
> die, there will be no viable free option for modern Fortran compilation 
> on OS X.  g95 is simply too slow and based on too old of a gcc codebase 
> to warrant consideration.
>
> Fortran is not a 'dead' language or standard. There are many features of 
> Fortran 2003 which are still being implemented in gfotran, and  
> essentially all of the Fortran 2008 standard (co-arrays!) still needs to 
> be implemented. The llvm/clang community appears to have nobody / very 
> few people interested in implementing a Fortran front-end, and the 
> gfortran maintainers are not going to branch out and start contributing 
> to clang. Fortran is still used every day in scientific computing and the 
> availability of a modern gcc/gfortran on OS X is a major reason I use 
> macports, and, in fact, and am able to use my Mac for work at all 
> (without shelling out for the Intel compilers). It is very important to 
> the HPC community that macports/Apple keeps the latest gcc up-to-date and 
> available!
>
> Brian
>
> p.s. ... I have patched the latest openmpi Portfile on my local machine, 
> making the obvious changes to allow it to use gcc44 instead of gcc43 (the 
> port seems stagnant). Compile + install went fine.
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Heh, it's kinda late now. We just got depreciated as a primary target
today...

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2009-09/msg01523.html

and they are already queuing up to commit patches which will
break the darwin builds...

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2009-09/msg01545.html

It will be interesting to see how helpful the other non-darwin
maintainers are without the requirement to support darwin as
a primary target.
             Jack