Re: One GCC for all targets.

[Stan Shebs <shebs@cygnus.com>]

   Date: Fri, 21 May 1999 01:47:25 +0000
   From: Brendan Simon <brendan@dgs.monash.edu.au>

   On the GDB mailing list there was discussion of one GDB executable which
   could debug multiple target architectures (eg. PPC, m68k, etc).  I was
   wondering if GCC would go down the same track ?  I'm sure that there
   would be alot of communication between the GDB and GCC/EGCS people (but
   I might be assuming too much).  Does anyone know or have any comments
   about future releases of GCC compiling for multiple target
   architectures.

I doubt this is going to happen anytime soon.  There is both a
qualitative and quantitative difference between machine descriptions
in GDB and GCC.  Not only are GCC's descriptions much larger and more
complex, they feed into the critical path of GCC's activities.  In
fact, the GCC build process includes nearly a dozen auxiliary programs
that build C code from the GCC descriptions, which is then compiled
directly into GCC.  On top of that, each GCC target has a number of
libraries (such as libgcc.a) that go along with the compiler proper,
and you'd have to carry all these along as well.  It's hard for me
to imagine a need so compelling to motivate this much work, rather
than just having several compilers installed and letting make do
all the choosing.

For GDB we're already seeing multi-architecture multi-processor
systems going out into the world, and it would be awkward at best
to try to control them with multiple debuggers.

							Stan