[Info-vax] Itanic is a dead end : IBM

[John Wallace]

On May 27, 11:06 am, Single Stage to Orbit <alex.bu... at munted.org.uk>
wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-05-27 at 02:09 -0700, IanMiller wrote:
> > Intel Fortran compiler for Windows and linux no longer supports IA-64
> > - no surprise there as windows and linux dropping support for IA-64
>
> Linux still supports IA-64. Only some distributions have dropped support
> for it.
>
> Also, GCC still supports IA-64. Why use a commercial compiler when there
> are decent FOSS compilers out there?
> --
> Tactical Nuclear Kittens

"some distributions have dropped support for IA64."

Of those that ever had IA64 support, how many remain?

"GCC still supports IA-64. Why use a commercial compiler when there
are decent FOSS compilers out there?"

Fair question, and the obvious answer for the DEC community is perhaps
"because the Intel one has the Steve Lionel stamp of approval, and the
Intel compiler and library team include some other good folks who were
doing similar stuff at DEC before things went silly?"

Outside the DEC community, someone who wanted a decent modern compiler
and was willing to accept something that was good enough for Apple
wouldn't necessarily start from gcc anyway. llvm seems like the place
to be.

llvm has gcc-based front ends for various languages and its own code
generators [1]:
# An easily retargettable code generator, which currently supports
X86, X86-64, PowerPC, PowerPC-64, ARM, Thumb, SPARC, Alpha, CellSPU,
MIPS, MSP430, SystemZ, and XCore.
# A Just-In-Time (JIT) code generation system, which currently
supports X86, X86-64, PowerPC and PowerPC-64.

See anything important missing from those lists?


[1] http://llvm.org/Features.html