[synthetix]

No.

Quite definitive LAWL. I only ask as the GCC versions in Nekoware had Ada, GCJ, ObjC etc. Didn't know if someone had a specific need for them.

I can probably try the d frontend at some point, but no guarantees; I've never worked with that.

Nah, Objective-C requires yet another runtime, and it's only really used for macOS/iOS development, mainly for GUI stuff. There are some media APIs and possibly some network stuff that requires Objective-C (AVFoundation, for example), but I mainly stick to portable code and only use ObjC when absolutely necessary.
Plus, a lot of iOS people are moving to Swift. So even Apple thinks it's crap.

[Raion]

Well fair enough! Once I get this done, I plan to go back to working on other things. Got GCC 6.5.0 building, then I'll get to 9.4.0, build them into my project I'm working on, release that, and then a LONG rest lol.

[synthetix]

Well fair enough! Once I get this done, I plan to go back to working on other things. Got GCC 6.5.0 building, then I'll get to 9.4.0, build them into my project I'm working on, release that, and then a LONG rest lol.

That's awesome, dude. That's a lot of work! I definitely want to test it when you have something ready. I want to try porting this cool OpenGL app I made for Windows.  It's mostly OpenGL 1.x stuff, so it should port over to Irix pretty easily.

[Raion]

Sure, the goal is that anyone can use GCC (I prefer MIPSPro, for a lot of reasons I won't get into, if you don't have it licensed, search "flexlm" on the wiki.irixnet.org site for some help ) without needing to install didbs or RSE. it's a sort of standalone version. I'll have 4.8.5 and a few others built with gfortran, at least, and publish the patches soon, the GCC project I'm working on will come later.

[Raion]

Small update. GCC 6.5, 7.5 and 8.5 all compile but are unacceptably failing some testsuites. I haven't tried 9.5 yet, but I'll try didbs compiler for that just to ensure it's not my compilers buggering it. I am going to fix GCC 5.5 and try again, and then up-port my fixes to those versions if I can figure it out. I suspect part of the failures are testsuites not built for IRIX, but we'll see. Either way, I feel I'm in the home stretch!

I sincerely hope this at least helps, if no-one else, the RSE guys in seeing the few patches they overlooked? Otherwise, I'm gonna just take this for my own education! I would sincerely appreciate any feedback they, or anyone else, is willing to offer, since I'm moreorless just trying to benefit the ecosystem in my own way. 

I've not had time to do a proper tardist for 4.8.5, but here's a tarbz2 of it. It does work better, IME, than the GCC 4.7.4 that was tardist'd by SGUG in 2019.

Patch is here: http://irix.cc/raion/gcc-4.8.5-irix-good.patch

This includes GMP patches, my hacked download_prerequisites, and a whole bunch of other bits I cobbled together into a working patch that seems to produce an acceptable GCC on IRIX.

[Raion]

Ok, so I tried 9.4.0. Here's the results: https://pastebin.com/ajuycVaR

Now, let me explain my intentions going forward:

Three software distributions of GCC will be released for IRIX. The first is this one, which has 4.8.5, 4.9.4, 5.5.0, and the 9.4.0 experimental build. I will release final patches for them sooner or later, but not now. I'm burnt out, and rather than make me throw my keyboard, I'm gonna take a few weeks/months off, come back to this with a clear head, and try again for a complete set.

4.8.5 and 4.9.4 are the ones I recommend to use, unless you REALLY need C++14 or higher. And let's be honest, there's not that much existing software that requires that high of a GCC version that actually is gonna compile for IRIX and be useful, with the possible exception of LLVM? 4.8.5 in my experience is the best I've done. I'll go back and do a 4.7.4 version at some point.

The next distribution will be a tardist version of the above, and it will have updated binutils using didbs binutils patches.

The final one is a GCC "SDK" independent of any project, and will cover 4.7.4 - 9.4.0 (maybe a 9.5.0 if that gets released soonish) plus binutils, dejagnu etc.

I'm gonna wrestle with OCaml, IRIXCE Patchset 2, Xenoware, and a bunch of other stuff I have planned for the next few weeks/months, just to keep my mind fresh.

In the meantime, expect those tardists and tarballs soon. I'll be posting them here and putting them in the Nekoware distribution, supplanting 4.7.1 there (along with a standalone 4.8.5).

[Raion]

Finally getting back around to some of my work here -- unfortunately I've misplaced many of my patches and work here, but I also know the basics of what I did.

I will be creating, on the new wiki, a library of GCC versions from 4.6 to 9.4.x that include patches, test notes, and also a table to help assist others with selecting a compiler.

I won't lie, on some level I do think that GCC's later versions are of dubious utility on IRIX, My experience showed me that the "speed" of GCC on IRIX plateau'd between versions 4.8.x and 5.x, and it's mostly stayed the same. The main impetus for GCC on IRIX revival was many motives, but the fact remains that there's just not much software that needs beyond C11/C++11 that would benefit us. C++14, 17, 20, these versions are still not widely used and as the world marches towards Rust we will be left behind in some respects.

But, there's little need to despair. IRIX wasn't going to work with GTK2 or 3 as well, and Firefox was always a lost cause to us. We're chasing impossible web standards on systems that have neither JITs nor SIMD to keep up.

[vishnu]

Ha ha ha Raion you're killin' me, the world is not marching toward Rust, idiot companies who hire crappy programmers, yeah maybe. 😁 And that's what Rust is; a language for "programmers" who are too lazy to actually learn how to program.

With regard to gcc on MIPS, from my admittedly minuscule understanding, MIPS actually assigned one or two of their software/MIPS hardware experts to help gcc run better on MIPS. That doesn't mean workstation processors like ours, MIPS gave up developing those 20 years ago, anyway it really surprised me because if you look at their website, the amount of money MIPS charges for their compiler is staggering, but hey, if you're a company that's going to sell a billion set-top boxes a year I guess that's not an issue. Okay I'll stop rambling now... 😝

[Raion]

In my new hub article for GCC, I mention this:

"The only decently working frontends for GCC as of 2023 are gcc and g++, for C and C++ respectively. There's numerous ways from here that the community can improve GCC on IRIX:

* Fix testsuites. Breakage happens as time goes on, 4.9.x being the one with the least regressions (reported in 2021 by Raion)
* Fix GNAT, GCJ and others. These may not be of direct importance to many, but they would be nice to have as options.
* Improve codegen. Check the GCC MIPS Backend and as necessary optimize for MIPS III/IV. Most post-2011 MIPS changes benefit embedded MIPS, not SGI MIPS."

[vishnu]

Oh man, if I had 20 free seconds a day to figure out how gcc works I would so do that. Just the basics of understanding how to create a parse tree are so mind numbing it makes my head spin... 🤪