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Re: Firefox 51.0.1-1 on Debian Sid/experimental PowerPC (PPC32): Segmentation fault



Στις 13-02-2017, ημέρα Δευ, και ώρα 21:00 +0100, ο/η John Paul Adrian
Glaubitz έγραψε:
> I don't know whether you have already dealt with the internals of
> compilers in the past, but I can tell you that it isn't a matter of
> just "fixing" it. For it to work, someone actually has to maintain
> the codebase for this target. Because as the code is being developed,
> it will break again and again unless someone actually tests the code
> on these architectures.

I'm not a compiler developer, but I've done my share of compiler
bootstrapping/bug reporting/bug fixing. In fact I'm one of the
maintainers of LDC (LLVM D compiler), and I've bootstrapped the package
for armhf/ppc64/ppc64le and working on arm64/powerpc and other arches
to follow (s390x/mips*) when I have the time. I've also done quite a
few bug reports to gcc upstream (mostly NEON ICEs for armhf). So I have
a pretty good idea of what's involved, though I've only scratched Rust
on the surface and never actually developed on/for it.

> The problem is that - unlike Golang - no one outside Mozilla cares
> seriously
> enough about Rust that they would maintain it on other architectures.
> For
> Google's Golang, the architecture ports are maintained by the
> hardware
> vendors themselves. For example, IBM maintains Golang on POWER
> (ppc64el
> and ppc64 and zSeries, Google (being a big ARM supporter because of
> Android)
> themselves maintain Golang on ARM, Oracle on sparc64 and so on.

I know for a fact that there are people pushing for IBM to actively
support Rust on ppc64*. Whether that works or not, I have no idea, but
at least people are not idle.

> For Rust, there is currently no such support. Mozilla develops and
> tests
> on x86 only. Everything else is not guaranteed to work at all and may
> blow up in your face.

As with all new languages it will take time, but eventually it will get
there, with a big IF. The biggest(only?) problem with PowerPC in
general right now is hardware availability not lack of interested
developers. Developers will try anything new if it's decently priced
(as ARM/MIPS have already proven). Show me a decent 64-bit PowerPC
board at ~100-200EUR, Talos was a great idea, but about $17k more
expensive than it should have been.

Regards

Konstantinos

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