Re: ANN: GCC 4.9.0 for Mac OS X Mavericks

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Tuesday, May 6, 2014 10:03:57 AM UTC-5, kylix wrote:
> On Tuesday, May 6, 2014 7:06:11 PM UTC+8, Dan'l Miller wrote:
>
> > What was the blocking obstacle that you could not fix regarding linking Clang-compiled Objective-C
> > or Objective-C++ with GCC-compiled Ada?  (I am not interested in fully replacing Clang-compiled
> > Objective-C[++] for iOS's UI with Ada--only using Ada the way that Apple recommends using C++
> > with Objective-C++ as invoked by Objective-C[++].)
> 
> I look at apple gcc 4.2 source, found apple make a lot patches to gcc source code, so if we want to make
> new version gcc work around with iOS, too many works need to do. I also try dragonegg, make it work
> on my macbook, but unfortunely it does not support arm-apple-darwin target.

Does anyone know:

Of the patches that Apple made to GCC 4.2, how many are localized to Objective-C, Objective-C++, C, and C++ front-ends?  (These would not affect linking Clang/LLVM-compiled code to GNAT-compiled libraries, other than the automated binding generation from C, which can be avoided for the time being.)  (Again, the focus here is linking Clang/LLVM-compiled Objective-C[++] object-files for UI layers of an app to GNAT-compiled object-files for nonUI layers of an app.)

Of the patches that Apple made to GCC 4.2, how many were to the back-end?  Of those, how many were never pulled forward (or ported) to the mainline of GCC 4.3 and later?  Of those, how many were affecting only Intel-based Mac proper, not the cross-compilation to ARM devices?   I suspect that this narrowing of focus results in drastically fewer ARM-iOS patches that either never showed up in GCC 4.9 or that have undergone software-rot due to infrequent use/maintenance since Apple switched to Clang/LLVM.

Mac(-proper) developers for Intel processors who use the GCC 4.8 & 4.9 GNAT compiler (but who do not develop in GNAT for ARM-based devices) should have some feel for the stability of the drastically-post-4.2 GCC compiler releases for all the patches other than the ones specifically for arm-apple-darwin.  Any insights on these non-ARM patches, GNAT users on Intel-based Mac:  are drastically-post-4.2 GCC releases (especially GNAT releases) stable for Ada-on-Mac development?