Re: enabling all supported languages in GCC

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> skribis:

> Still, it is currently not possible to use GCC with languages other than
> C or C++.  Installing “gcc-objc” along with the regular GCC, for
> example, you won’t get a working compiler for Objective C as the default
> GCC’s “gcc” binary does not know about the Objective C language.

This problem is specific to Objective C(++), no?

For Fortran, Ada, and Go(?), people run a command other than ‘gcc’, so I
guess these work fine.

Regardless, definitely worth fixing!

> Even setting COMPILER_PATH to point at the tools for the Objective C
> compiler won’t fix this.
>
> I propose this:
>
> * enable all languages in GCC by default so that their “lang-spec.h”
>   headers are included.  This does not mean we should build all language
>   frontends.  We only want to ensure that the “gcc” won’t refuse to
>   compile something just because it doesn’t know about the language.

I think the --enable-languages option will inevitable lead to building
all the front-ends and run-time support libraries, which is undesirable.

> * when installing “gcc”, set COMPILER_PATH to use additional languages.
>
> I don’t know if this is feasible or if there’s a different way to
> achieve this.  It may even be enough to patch GCC’s “gcc/Makefile.in”
> such that “lang_specs_files” holds the names of all supported languages,
> which will ensure that all available “lang-spec.h” files end up being
> included.

I haven’t checked, but I’m guessing we’ll have to manually tweak
lang-spec.h rather than use --enable-languages.

Thanks,
Ludo’.