How to build Julia with GCC and for ppc32?

[barracuda156]

I am interested to build Julia for PowerPC Darwin.
Since clang is broken for ppc, it has to be done with gcc (gcc11 and gfortran are available).
From what I see Julia tries to force usage of clang and seems to lack ppc and ppc64 ABI.
Is there a way to fix that?

[vchuravy]

We only support ppc64le-gnu, and that just barely. Supporting ppc32 will involve a lot of work, and the fact that clang is broken doesn't instill confidence since both clang and julia use llvm.

[barracuda156]

We only support ppc64le-gnu, and that just barely. Supporting ppc32 will involve a lot of work, and the fact that clang is broken doesn't instill confidence since both clang and julia use llvm.

It is possible to use gcc as a compiler instead of clang+llvm? I could look into ppc support in Julia whether it can be fixed for Darwin, but fixing clang/llvm is out of question.

[vchuravy]

We use LLVM as a backend, so you could compile Julia with GCC, but the code Julia generates still uses LLVM

[barracuda156]

Thank you. That is upsetting, but what to do. There are little hopes in fixing LLVM, it is substantially broken and no one has time to deal with it.

[vchuravy]

Yeah from our side supporting gcc as a JIT backend would be an enormous undertaking that no-one has the appetite for.

[barracuda156]

We only support ppc64le-gnu, and that just barely. Supporting ppc32 will involve a lot of work, and the fact that clang is broken doesn't instill confidence since both clang and julia use llvm.

Is it possible to support GCC build? Forget ppc32, I can try fixing that, but GCC it a must for that.

[giordano]

Is it possible to support GCC build? Forget ppc32, I can try fixing that, but GCC it a must for that.

Valentin already answered that question:

We use LLVM as a backend, so you could compile Julia with GCC, but the code Julia generates still uses LLVM

To reiterate once more: the julia executable itself can in general be compiled with GCC, that's what everybody does on Linux, but you also need a working LLVM for the architecture you want to use, because that's what julia will use as backend to generate code.