MacPorts and OpenMP---or how to build "everything" with MacPorts GCC?

[Lawrence Velázquez]

On Jun 20, 2013, at 8:41 AM, Hans Ekkehard Plesser <hans.ekkehard.plesser at umb.no> wrote:

> I much appreciate MacPorts philosophy of making itself maximally independent from tools shipped with OSX. Therefore, I have never quite understood why MacPorts insists on using the system compiler. I very well understand that it is virtually impossible to support a range of compilers, but why not use MacPorts own GCC as default then?

In addition to the reasons Ryan already mentioned, compiling ports universal is much easier with Clang and, before it, Apple's custom GCC and LLVM-GCC, which operate lipo(1) on their own. Using FSF GCC requires creating the universal binaries manually. (We have to do this with some ports anyway, and it's generally unpleasant business.)

> I'd much appreciate some information on why MacPorts has made the choices it has made and whether there are any plans for change.

We are not planning to switch away from Clang as our preferred compiler. There's been some discussion about ridding MacPorts of its dependency on Xcode, but even in that scenario, we'd probably just switch to our own Clang.

vq