Apparently, glibc's static linking support is deprecated?

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Fri May 14 05:15:30 UTC 2010


On Thursday 13 May 2010 06:32:27 Laurent Bercot wrote:
> > Ulrich Drepper, the glibc maintainer, has gone crazy and believes that
> > static linking should never be used for anything:
> >
> >   http://people.redhat.com/drepper/no_static_linking.html
>
>  Think about it. *Who* in his sane mind would become the glibc maintainer ?
>  Even if Ulrich Drepper still had a functional brain at the time, years of
> dealing with glibc aren't a healthy thing. I can't really blame him.
>
>  But it's okay. If glibc drops supporting static linking, it's going to
> become a niche libc. Things will break. And uClibc will fill the gap.
> Good news all in all.
>
>  I'm *much* more concerned about gcc, because if the gcc people go insane
> - I mean, even more insane - there's still no serious alternative to gcc
> and the free software world will be in trouble.

What do you mean "if"?  They went GPLv3, didn't they?  Past tense.

That triggered the OpenBSD guys to dig up the compiler BSD used before gcc 
(the Portable C Compiler from the 1970's) and extend it to full C99 and x86-64 
support with a modern optimizer:

  http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/

Meanwhile Apple hung back at gcc 4.2.1 (the last GPLv2 release) and funded 
work on LLVM/CLANG to form their new official compiler:

  http://clang.llvm.org/

Other people are working on others.  This one has a google summer of code 
project coming up:

  http://www.open64.net/

Tinycc turned into a windows-only project for a while but the Debian guys have 
recently started attacking it...  And so on.

Rob
-- 
Latency is more important than throughput. It's that simple. - Linus Torvalds


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