Re: Autoconf and a bare-metal host with no C library

[Zack Weinberg]

On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 10:24 AM, Russell Shaw <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 13/10/16 13:11, Luca Saiu wrote:
> ...
>> So, what I'm asking you is: does a clean solution exist, or compiling
>> without a runtime library is just not supported by the Autotools?  It
>> sounds weird to say that for configuring you need a cross-compiler with
>> support for a runtime that will never even be linked when building.
>> Shouldn't there be, at least, one variant of AC_PROG_CC which doesn't
>> fail in a fatal way?
>>
>> I'm not yet linking the code in a public forum just because it still
>> lacks copyright and license headers; but in case it were useful to you,
>> even if I doubt it, I can clean it up and publish it.
>
> It can be messy and take quite some time to figure out what to do, but this
> kind of stuff is handled in the autoconf/automake/autogen build system of
> binutils and gcc. Not a quick and easy path for the uninitiated though.

As I recall, what gcc/binutils do about a very similar problem is
considered an awkward kludge, and if you could contribute to a
_proper_ solution, your help would be most welcome.  You might want to
bring up the problem you're having on the address@hidden mailing
list, as that will be seen by more people who understand how this
kludge works.  I can tell you that grepping libstdc++-v3 for the
string "NO_EXECUTABLES" is likely to provide some hints, but it has
been more than ten years since I had to touch it myself.

zw