drop gcc?

[JanMarvin]

https://groups.google.com/g/v8-users/c/-vbS2agi1Kw

V8 will follow Chromium's lead and will stop providing infrastructure for GCC builds. We will still accept patches from the community but we will not invest in keeping this build functioning. To give projects time to adjust, we will perform this change after V8 version 13.0 in September 2024.

[jeroen]

Thanks. I think at least nodejs will try to keep gcc support alive...

[JanMarvin]

MSVC support is also removed. Upstream recommends building with clang-cl.

Currently this issue is more of a hint to myself. gcc builds have been broken a few times in the past and clang builds are much quicker (2hs instead of 3h). I'm aware of issues with cross compilation of clang libraries and gcc R and packages, that's the only reason why I'm still building with gcc.

[JanMarvin]

Its getting a bit annoying. At the moment the current release is again not able to build with GCC. Thankfully, there is again a patch in review, but trying and failing to build with GCC is wasting my time and resources. Currently it fails at [1031/2385] CXX obj/v8_base_without_compiler/string.o which is probably after a good hour compiling with all 16 threads on my (a bit dated) desktop system. And that is probably the fourth time this has happend in the last two months or so?

[JanMarvin]

In a recent commit, Milad Fa—who has been maintaining V8's compatibility with GCC, likely due to IBM's needs for building on ppc64le/s390x—hinted that these efforts to support GCC may soon come to an end. Unless someone else steps up to continuously cleanup after upstream, this is very likely the end of V8 GCC builds.

I try to revamp the clang branch.

[jeroen]

Thanks good to know. Hopefully someone from Node or Debian will step up.

[JanMarvin]

Just a FYI: I've switched this repo to clang a while ago, therefore I was no longer directly impacted by broken gcc support. Recently another team at IBM took over Milads work to provide fixes for gcc in V8. But these fixes were iterated a few times until they were accepted by upstream V8, it took a couple of weeks for one of the fixes. (Edit: the commits are here)

At this point I would consider gcc a burden in the build process of the V8 library. IBM will probably switch to building with clang as well, once they have reached the platform support they are aiming for.