[Chicken-hackers] Dropping SunCC and Solaris 9

[John Cowan]

Peter Bex scripsit:

> I think now is a good time to consider whether we want to (continue)
> support for SunCC.  It's a buggy piece of shit which has not active
> development to speak of (no C99 in a *commercial* compiler?  Please!),
> and there are good and easily-available alternatives available for
> Solaris and its free descendants (notably clang and gcc).

I agree; drop it.  The modern Chicken philosophy is to support only those
platforms that are themselves under reasonably active development, and
not to worry about Win16 or VMS or OSF/1 or other such moribund systems.
This gives us the simplest configuration system in the open-source world,
and relieves us of a lot of headaches brought on by hypothetical issues.

Solaris 9 falls into this category: its last update was eight years ago,
and in another 18 months it will be EOLed completely.  If we support gcc
and clang across platforms, that should suffice.  (However, we should of
course have proper support for MSVC, and the fact that we don't is a
genuine and serious gap.)

> PS: Isn't this something libm needs to take care of rather than the
> C compiler?  If so, gcc or clang builds are broken on Solaris, too,

Almost certainly.

-- 
John Cowan                                   address@hidden
        "You need a change: try Canada"  "You need a change: try China"
                --fortune cookies opened by a couple that I know